


Though she may forget

by LadyCharity



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Brother Feels, Child Abandonment, Culture Shock, Emotional Baggage, Family, Family Feels, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized racism, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-03-22 23:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3747877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyCharity/pseuds/LadyCharity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Well, I don't see how you have a choice, says the fox. </p><p> </p><p>In which Loki comes to terms with what it means to be an Asgardian, a brother, and a son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Loki does not feel anything. He would blame it on the numbness, on the chill that cuts off all nerves from doing their good work—ice makes stone out of living things. And on a realm of snow and ice, he does not expect anything more of it.

He wants to lay himself down. Maybe the snow will cover him, and if his AEsir visage can sink down from his skin and into his blood and bones, maybe he will freeze to death. That would not be a terrible option. If the Void cannot do it, if a sword to the chest cannot do it, surely the third time is the charm.

He imagines there must be a cave somewhere in this godforsaken realm—some rock carving where all the Jotun huddle, except surely they are all dead after the Bifröst some years back, so it could be where Loki catches his breath, or maybe like a cat crawl away and die, whichever will come first. He wonders, vaguely, if the seidr he casts to shield Heimdall’s gaze from him will lift if Loki does croak in the middle of this realm—of course, whether Heimdall would have seen Loki’s body in Svartalfheim or in Jotunheim, it doesn’t matter to Loki. Let Heimdall find it, let Thor spit on it after he realizes his deception, or let him turn away and tell Heimdall to look elsewhere, to his mortal friends, because there is nothing to see here.

Loki shivers. He shouldn’t be—while he is not about to strip himself to the bare chest like some Jotun soldiers run amok in and wonder why they keep getting stabbed to death so easily, he had thought that he would at least not find Jotunheim drafty. But he shivers, with only simple armor keeping out the cold, and it occurs to him once or twice that maybe he should not feel like his chest has stones in them, and the only natural motion left to him is to pitch forward.

As far as possible, he thinks, with each ragged breath and heavy step, through snow and wind. Anywhere, where no one can see him, or touch him, as far as possible…

He sucks in a breath and strides forward. Each step makes his body feel heavier and heavier.

Sometimes he runs. As if some invisible predator reawakens the animal in his chest and he needs to run, and he looks over his shoulder to the nothingness of Jotunheim, expecting a beast, or a bilgesnipe, or Asgard’s army screaming _monster, monster_ before they give him what he undoubtedly deserves. He runs, as fast as he could, which is barely anything at all, but it dissipates to nothing every twenty meters, when he runs and runs to save his skin only to stop and think, why? But why?

He stumbles and falls to his knees. The stones under his hands make his palms sting. He coughs, twice, before scooping snow from the ground and pressing it into his lips. He licks the melting crystals, and when he realizes that this is all done to stay alive, he feels compromised.

With his knees to the ground, he feels too tired to rise to his feet. The snow is bleeding through his knees, but he feels nothing. It has been a long day, and he is so tired. If he doesn’t have to get up ever again, he would not object.

Loki lies on his side, cheek pressed against the ice. His breath makes clouds over the snow. He isn’t crazy, or delirious—he is simply tired, and if Asgard will never dare come here to condemn him, then he will gladly surrender himself to winter.

As far as possible, his mind wheezes. What’s the point, his heart says. Please, no more, his bones weep.

Just for a little while, he reasons with himself, as he closes his eyes. He hasn’t slept in so long. He wonders, grimly, if posing as Odin for however long he did made the Odinsleep rub off on him. His eyes close, and he breathes in deeply. Just for a little while.

Please, his bones weep. No more.

-

When his dreams melt away, Loki forgets that he is Jotunheim, that he had fallen asleep in the snow, that he is running away, that he is lost, that he is homeless. He almost thinks, for a moment, that he is dead, despite breathing crisp air, because his bones do not feel weary and his chest does not hurt, so surely this is a mercy.

It is only until he feels his skin, shivering from the cold and under a weight he can’t remember, that he realizes he that he feels someone watching him.

His eyes open immediately, and he gasps a little, as if the weight of someone’s gaze is crushing him. His heart races in his chest—what if Heimdall sees him here, what if they know he is alive, that he survived, not dead, what if they—?

And like that, his heart skips a beat, so suddenly he nearly chokes. This is not where he last lay his head, by no means a cave. And by no means, in fur.

Panic rushes through him. He throws it off of him. Ghosts, whispers some childish scrap of him, the same one that used to make him jump onto his bed with a running start before draugrs under the bed could catch his ankles. Even though he knows ghosts are real (the ones in his head), he can’t stop his skin from prickling.

His hands fly to his armor, making sure everything is in place. He brought no knives, but his heart still stops a little when he finds none at his waist. He stands, trying to clear his head—it has been a long day, and he doesn’t remember what it is that he is afraid of.

“Careful,” says a voice.

He spins around. At the mouth of a cave is a shadow, long and spindly, spreading like oil stains along the rock. Loki cannot see clearly in this darkness, with the white of the snow behind this dark figure so he looks like a shadow puppet, but the towering height makes Loki’s heart turn to ice.

“Jotun,” he breathes.

Without thinking, he lashes out at the Frost Giant. Seidr sweeps forward, rushing with the cold wind in the cave, the dust at his feet, rushing straight to the Jotun.

The Jotun swipes his hand. The wind shudders and stops, withering away into nothing but breaths. Loki’s heart jumps into his throat.

He is not a child, nor is he a fool like Thor. But he realizes that his heart jumps to draw Jotun blood much more swiftly as a man than as a child.

“Get back!” Loki says.

He doesn’t know what he fears the Jotun would do to him, or has done to him. What comes to mind, quickest and loudest, is that he would touch him.

“Stand down,” the Jotun says.

The Jotun comes forward. Loki clenches his teeth.

I said get back, you wretched beast.

“What do you want?” Loki says. He swallows—his mouth is thick. “What did you take me for?”

He tries to look for weapons in the cave, but he sees nothing but the fur that he had lay on just moments before. He looks up to the Jotun again—the contrast of the light from outside still makes his face invisible to him, but Loki does not care to meet eyes. He clenches his fist—a blade to the chest, to the side of the neck, ought to do the trick, and he could run. He thought all the Jotun would be dead now, but if that isn’t the case now then he will make it history himself, again.

“If you run out there without me,” says the Jotun, “or if you kill me along the way, they will certainly have your head.”

“I’d like to see them try,” Loki says, without knowing who ‘they’ are.

“Don’t,” says the Jotun. “They’d do a very good job of it.”

Loki presses his lips into a thin line. The Jotun puts up his hands—they are massive, like shields, and the Jotun’s voice makes him think of avalanches.

“Will you stand down?” says the Jotun.

“What am I, your prisoner?” Loki says.

“You can be,” the Jotun says. Loki raises his eyebrows. “Don’t seem so surprised. I’d say you wanted to kill me on the spot when you saw me.”

Loki says nothing. His mind works quickly—he shall be damned if he should remain a Frost Giant’s prisoner, all for intruding on their realm, and destroying it partially some years ago, for starters.

“What for?” Loki says. “As a bargaining chip?”

“And hand you easily back to Asgard?” the Jotun says. “No—not at all.”

Loki carefully keeps quiet the fact that Asgard as a general whole is overjoyed of his absence. He had posed as king some time after his alleged death, after all. But if this Jotun would truly reach out to Asgard, to grab Loki by the nape and swing him back and forth like a bedraggled cat to be claimed for Asgard to see, Loki would rather hang from the Jotun’s hand than dangle from it.

 “Then,” Loki says, “a slave?”

“I would never make you a slave,” the Jotun says. For a thunderous voice, he speaks mild-manneredly, like he is reciting children’s poetry every time he speaks. “Even if you are the prince of Asgard.”

Loki does not lift his chin, nor dip it. He pretends the title is little more than nothing.

“Will you not try attacking me if I come closer?” says the Jotun.

Loki does not respond. The Jotun takes the benefit of the doubt and comes closer, hands kept still at his sides. Loki’s fingers twitch, but he stays his seidr, for the time being.

“If I were never a prince,” he says, with carefully chosen words, “would you have killed me on the spot?”

“Why?” says the Jotun. “Is that what you’d do if I were sleeping in the middle of a field in Asgard?”

Loki’s jaw twitches. The Jotun smiles—as the lights adjust in Loki’s eyes, he can see more clearly the Jotun’s face. The lines along the forehead and cheeks distract him.

“What is your name?”

The Jotun is breathless. His red eyes search Loki’s face feverishly. Loki tries hard not to meet them.

 “I thought you already knew who I was,” he says.

“I know you’re one of the princes,” says the Jotun. “That should be good enough credit.”

Loki doesn’t know if he should laugh.

“So what good is my name?” Loki says.

“I want to know what you call yourself,” the Jotun says. “Rather than just silence.”

“You don’t know, already?” says Loki.

“Do you know my name?” the Jotun says.

“I don’t imagine a reason why I would,” Loki says.

“Then how could I already know yours?” says the Jotun.

Loki’s smile widens in spite of himself.

“You already know I was a prince of Asgard,” Loki says.

“And I’m a prince of Jotunheim,” says the Jotun. “Would that make you know my name?”

Loki raises his eyebrows. The Jotun bears nothing of importance—a fur cloak, maybe, and colorful strands of silk braided into his long hair, but no crown, or armor, or anything remotely significant that could mark him. He half expected the Jotun to be joking.

“If you were truly a prince, I ought to know,” Loki says.

“No,” the Jotun sighs. “You wouldn’t. No one on other realms do, anyway. They see no point.”

He must be jesting. What prince would wander without guard or support on his own, without any armor or protection? No heir would be left so grossly unattended—until Loki remembers, with a jolt, that a prince of Jotunheim would be a son of Laufey. It is too much to realize in one moment, so he shoves his thoughts away from that corner immediately.

The Jotun is walking toward Loki again. Loki sets his feet against the rock, firming his stance. The Jotun raises his hand, two fingers held up.

“My name is Helblindi,” he says. “Look, I’m not going to hurt you. I swear, my seidr is tame.”

“You have seidr?” Loki says.

He wishes his surprise did not so quickly escape his voice. Helblindi smiles. He has thin lips.

“It’s a family trait,” Helblindi says.

Helblindi towers over him, until Loki feels like a child before him. He holds out his two fingers toward Loki. Loki stares at them, wondering how many different ways that Helblindi could kill him with just two fingers if he wanted. He does not put it past the Jotun, if they survived the Bifröst, to remember who it was that tried destroying their home.

“Helblindi, son of Laufey,” Loki says.

Helblindi nods. He looks to Loki, patiently.

“What do you call yourself?” Helblindi says.

Loki could hardly say for himself anymore. Loki does not exist—he is supposed to be dead and rotted in an abandoned realm. Odinson does not exist, unless it is Thor, and he is no Thor. Laufeyson does not exist, nor would Loki ever wish it upon himself. He speaks to no one anymore, thinks of himself in no way except with curses, bitter mutterings in his dreams. He calls himself nothing, because even riding horses are given names.

“Loki,” he says. If he ought to have been dead all this time, he sees no risk in dying.

“Loki,” Helblindi says. He beams. “Loki. I see.”

His hand is still held aloft, two fingers kept straight and high. Loki is half tempted to ask if the cold has frozen him to stand in such a way.

“Will you not greet me?” says Helblindi.

“Have we not gone over this already?” says Loki.

Helblindi lets his hand fall to his side, shoulders slumped.

“I suppose they don’t teach you that in Asgard,” Helblindi says.

The Jotun is too close for Loki’s comfort. He shifts to the side, trying to find some leeway to the mouth of the cave if he needs to run.

“Are you finished with me?” Loki says. “Or are you content with the idea of adopting me as a pet?”

“A pet?” says Helblindi. “What—what are you talking about?”

“What do you think to keep me here for?” says Loki.

“Keep you?” Helblindi says. “You mean—you do not mean to stay?”

Loki cannot help himself—he laughs. It makes Helblindi’s shoulders stiffen.

“I may have made a cot out of your snow,” Loki says, wiping his dry eyes with the back of his glove. “But I think I’d be damned to stay here.”

He looks up to Helblindi. He doesn’t know what he would have expected, but Helblindi’s look of crestfallen affront is not remotely close to what he would have guessed. His laughter fades immediately.

“You don’t mean for me to stay here long either, do you?” Loki says.

Helblindi hesitates. Loki suddenly feels an invisible pressure wrap around him—his knees tense, and he knows that if just runs fast enough right now and not look back, Helblindi would not have time to catch him.

“But you’ve come back,” Helblindi says. “You came back to Jotunheim. Why would you come back if not to…?”

Helblindi stands too close. Loki backs away immediately. Don’t touch me, says his skin, white and borrowed.

“If you believed something of me,” Loki says, “then I can assure you that at least a thousand years of Asgard’s experience can assure you that it is completely false.”

Helblindi snorts at the mention of Asgard—the first sign of any annoyance, which Loki cannot help but find mildly amusing, if not out of place. Frost Giants are brutish, angry creatures whose grunting would rival Thor’s. A rabid wolf has no time to be irritated.

“It would be a thousand years of Jotunheim’s experience were it not for Asgard’s meddling,” says Helblindi.

Loki’s skin prickles. Even though the Jotun is an arm’s length away, he is far too close, and Loki would not mind running deeper into the cave if he couldn’t run out of it.

“Laufey imparted some last family secrets before he was finished, I see,” Loki says.

Loki does not look at Helblindi. It clicks in his mind that maybe Helblindi thought Loki had returned to Jotunheim for more than just a breather.

“I heard that you had died,” Helblindi says.

“Well,” Loki says. “Surprise.”

He wonders if Jotunheim knows who unleashed the Bifröst upon them.

“The All-Father said you fell from the bridge,” Helblindi says. “When he had come to pay penance.”

“Did he,” Loki says. He gave a bark of laughter. “And he didn’t give you the punchline.”

“What is that?”

“That I jumped.”

Helblindi says nothing. Loki only grins.

“And I’m afraid you are a little behind with the times,” Loki says. “That was the first version of a miserable death attempt. Svartalfheim was an encore, but I’m afraid that wasn’t a successful run either, unfortunately for all of us. But no, the first and foremost would have been when your father tried to throw the runt cat into the river, so to speak.”

Helblindi’s jaw tenses. Loki wonders if Helblindi’s anger at offense runs as deeply as Thor’s once did. If Helblindi strikes to kill, Loki could hardly say he would die for a better cause.

“I’m not my father,” Helblindi says. His voice is quiet. “If that is what you fear.”

“I do not,” Loki says. Rather, he very much wishes that Helbindi _is_. Laufey would not hold small talk for this long. “Though, I can’t imagine you being dissimilar to him either. Instincts come naturally.”

He doesn’t know why he’s goading a fight. It makes him think of Thor, and he wants to spit the bad taste in his mouth.

Helblindi does not strike out, does not grab him by the throat like Odin would, or Thor would, or Thanos would, or Laufey would. He does not even snarl, like Odin would, or Thor would, or Thanos would. His red eyes flash for a moment—dark, stinging, stung. But they settle back, fire chilled by snow, and melting ice until his eyes are wet.

“Listen,” Helblindi says. “You must be—hungry, or cold. You shake. Let me take you back to our city.”

“I told you, I do not care to stay long,” Loki says. “If you mean to use me as a prisoner, I can assure you that Asgard will not wage a war for my sake.”

“Then where do you plan to go?” Helblindi says. “After this?”

Loki presses his lips together.

“Hel, maybe,” Loki says. “It has a better view.”

Helblindi tilts his head. His eyes linger on Loki’s forehead, his ear, his chin, as if he is mentally mapping out Loki’s thoughts, trying to study him. Loki almost believes that patches of his blue (natural) skin is beginning to show in this cold.

“But why not Asgard?” Helblindi says.

Loki opens his mouth, then closes it. He ought to laugh at the suggestion and Helblind’s naivety, but finds that he can’t quite let it out.

 “You are holding me prisoner now, just forcing me to listen to you speak,” Loki says.

“You know, I do have a realm that I lead,” Helblindi says. “I could have you arrested.”

“Where to, an igloo?”

“Executed, even,” Helblindi says.

“A fine option!”

“Loki,” Helblindi says.

He says the name slowly, carefully, tasting his brother’s name for the first time in over a thousand years. It is as foreign to him as ‘Helblindi’ is to Loki, and Loki does not plan on trying to say it often.

“Wouldn’t you like to meet your mother?” Helblindi says.

The answer is no. The answer is surely no, certainly no, absolutely no, because he knows he has a mother, he knows who is, or was, his mother. Whoever this woman that Helblindi speaks of is no mother of his, is no one of his, nothing to him, just as he is nothing to her, and there is no point in meeting ghosts and myths.

“Who is she?” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it this far into the first chapter of this story, then I offer you my congratulations, my utmost thanks and gratitude, and my tears. This story is definitely not within my usual vein of Loki fics, but I felt the urge to write it. A rather challenging piece for myself, dealing with trying to create a culture and mindset for Jotunheim, but not only that but also delve into a part of Loki's psyche that I feel like is a rich mine for exploration for both MCU and fics but I don't see it terribly tapped into often. I hope I do this idea justice, and thank you bunches for reading <3 
> 
> Also, as I am basically making up a culture for Jotunheim as best to my abilities, sometimes I might make decisions about their culture or communication or thought process that might not be clear in the writing, as I want to try to write this not as a textbook. If there are any questions, please feel free to ask me about them on my Tumblr where I can answer them!: mykingdomforapen.tumblr.com/ask


	2. Chapter 2

Helblindi is older than Thor. Helblindi remembers Loki leaving, whereas Thor hardly can recall Loki arriving. Maybe if he did, the whole Frost Giant/adoption ruse would have been more obvious to the both of them.

He’s older than Thor, which is easier to think for Loki than, Helblindi is older than me, because then it would reiterate the unspoken fact that Helblindi would have been his older brother, a position that Loki’s patience level only allows for one occupation.

“I was three hundred and fifty winters old,” Helblindi says.

He speaks lightly, as if Loki has any remote interest in Helblindi’s life story while they walk. Loki had half expected that Helblindi would have a steed to go to and fro—he is not keen on the notion that Helblindi had carried him to the cave, or touched him at all.

“But you were small enough to nearly fit your whole body in my hand,” Helblindi says. “I was told to be careful with you—I was afraid of breathing near you, else I might accidentally blow you off my hand.”

Loki is sure that Helblindi was instructed to carefully toss Loki onto the rock and watch if he bounced before Odin picked him up eventually. But he will allow Helblindi this naivety of a three-hundred and fifty-year-old.

“And did you?” Loki says.

He really doesn’t care, but if he humors Helblindi every now and then maybe Helblindi would object less when Loki says what he really thinks about Jotunheim’s landscape. 

“You’re safe and well now, aren’t you?” says Helblindi.

Loki hums.

“You’ve grown,” Helblindi says, while Loki can hardly reach his broad chest. He gives a small sigh, as if his thoughts exhaust him. “We both have.”

Loki looks away, as if the empty snow fields interest him.

“You kicked me in the face once,” Helblindi says.

“Did I?” Loki says.

“I was trying to ease you to sleep,” Helblindi says. “Then you kicked me in the nose.”

“I had quite the reach, then.”

“I’m still waiting for an apology.”

Loki raises an eyebrow at Helblindi. Helblindi’s unchecked smile betrays him. Maybe in some lifetime, Loki wouldn’t have minded being comical. But his muscles are weary, too weary even for a smile right now, not that he finds any of this amusing.

When Loki shows no sign of responding, Helblindi speaks faster.

“You weren’t as cranky as Byleistr was as an infant,” Helblindi says. “When Mother bathed him, he would freeze the water into ice upon touch so he couldn’t go in.”

“Is she not a noblewoman?” Loki says. “Why would she do the cleaning?”

Helblindi blinks at Loki.

“Why wouldn’t she?” Helblindi says. “Byleistr was a young child. Who else would do it? I was only so old—Mother hardly trusted me rocking you to sleep when you were around.”

“No nurse?” Loki says. “Why would a noblewoman have the time to take care of her children when there are servants?”

“Are you suggesting leaving her young child?” Helblindi says. “That’s absurd. The child would be defenseless and in need.”

“I’m sure that’s a great concern for your people when you let your infants hang out to dry at temples,” Loki says.

Helblindi’s eyebrows furrow. Loki feels like he had just told a joke of a reference no one understands.

“The child needs their mother at all times,” Helblindi says, a little more slowly than before, as if wary that Loki would interject with another unfitting point. “Why should someone else take care of the child? It will only cause fissures in the child’s upbringing. What sort of mother would let someone else be her child’s mother, if she is alive and capable?”

Words like whips with a thousand lashes rattle in Loki’s throat. He would like to ask Helblindi the same thing, if Frigga who needed a nurse on days she needed to tend to the kingdom was a less adequate mother than Helblindi’s own Mother Dearest who let some flesh and bone that crawled out of her body die on ice.

“Our own mother carried you at her bosom day and night, every day,” Helblindi says. “I couldn’t even kiss the tips of her fingers without you getting in between us.”

“Sounds like a rather condensed time frame for a matter of hours,” Loki says.

Helblindi missteps. He nearly falls onto one knee, but catches himself deftly. He turns back to Loki, a look of perplexity on his face.

“What hours are you talking about?” Helblindi says.

Loki stops, but half-heartedly, with more intent to keep walking and leave this shred of a conversation behind. He doesn’t mind throwing commentary, making remarks like invisible ink scrawled on the sides of poems. He is not keen on underlying bolded paragraphs, and pointing out what is already obvious and known, especially that which makes him feel more and more reluctant to walk on these rocks, when he ought to be spitting or bleeding on them.

“I can’t imagine the time between me being born and me being cast out onto a rock being a terribly long one,” Loki says. “Give or take a couple of hours when a war was waging in the background.”

He tries to move forward. Helblindi holds out his arm immediately. He takes Loki’s shoulder—his hand is so large it encompasses Loki’s entire upper arm.

“Your words sadden me,” Helblindi says. “I don’t know if you’re being intentionally hurtful, or if you’ve been nursing that strange idea yourself, but both ways pains me to hear them from you.”

Loki cannot help but stare at him. If this is a joke, Helblindi keeps the straightest face, because it makes little sense why he would so easily talk about trodden toes and wounded hearts without even batting an eye or even looking away in shame. Loki looks away for him, fixing his eyes on a distant haze of a mountain range rather than on Helblindi, who still stands terribly tall for someone who speaks so freely of keeling over.

“If you thought that was intentional,” Loki says. “You’d never stand a flyting.”

“Do you think we lost you when you were immediately born?” Helblindi says. “That we had not even bonded, just a little, before you were taken?”

“What difference does it make?” Loki says. “Several minutes or several days, you cast me out.”

“Mother held you close to her for several months before the AEsir took you,” Helblindi says. “She never let you go.”

Loki doesn’t move. Suddenly, it feels like the ground is shifting beneath him, causing great faults between his feet and he doesn’t trust that he stands anymore.

“She did at one point,” Loki says.

He continues walking. He doesn’t know where he is going, or even which direction this city Helblindi wants to take him lies. He doesn’t understand how Helblindi can recognize his way around when there is nothing to remember here. Even Hel has a river.

-

This is more familiar territory.

Familiar and foreign, all at once. Unlike Thor, Loki paid attention to their tutors about the other realms, like the dead elf society of Svartalfheim, and the unscrupulous dwarves, and of course, yours truly. He studied the old sketches that were made in manuscripts of Jotun territory, lands, maps, homes. _Frost Giants,_ read the manuscripts, _live in villages of small sodhouses to keep warm in their tundra environment. They live in tight communities rather than extended metropolis, and only travel in packs. Frost giants live on a diet consisting of mostly…and…They build temples to worship their deity of…their days are spent…_

It is as if he ought to be surprised that the Jotun faces he sees aren’t all blank death masks.

But Helblindi does not lead him into the town of sodhouses and stone towers. He glances down at Loki, who walks by his side, and flashes him a smile before quickening his pace, towards the outskirts of the town, where the trees are thick and heavy with snow on their branches. Loki vaguely wonders if that was perhaps a more preferable place for Helblindi to kill him, even though logically he knew Helblindi seems too poor a liar to pull that ruse.

“There is someone you must meet first,” Helblindi says. “Before you meet our mother. But he prefers to do his work outside of the city.”

“You failed to mention that earlier,” Loki says.

Helblindi smiles sheepishly. It makes Loki think of Thor, and he wondered how is it that the Norns have lassoed him with ridiculous brother figures no matter what context.

“I promise it isn’t just anyone,” Helblindi says. “I think many Jotun would not be keen on meeting you.”

“And I am not keen on meeting many Jotun,” Loki says. “I’ll fit along perfectly here, if I must be long.”

Helblindi’s smile stays. Loki wonders if he can make it a game with himself to see just how much it will take to chip it off of Helblindi’s face.

“It’ll be worth it,” Helblindi says. “He could only ever hear stories about you—oh, how he wished he had known you!”

“Maybe I should keep my distance after all,” Loki says, “as to not ruin the fantasy.”

“I am not your only brother, after all,” Helblindi says, as if he has not heard Loki.

At first, Loki thinks that Helblindi speaks of Thor. He stumbles, and nearly falls in the snow—Loki doesn’t know whether he unconsciously had tried to pick up his pace or stop himself from going any further.

Helblindi catches him by the arm. Loki shakes him off immediately, before he could feel the creeping chill in his skin underneath Helblindi’s palm.

“I never intended to come here for a family reunion,” Loki says.

Helblindi stops in his steps. Loki’s raised voice seems to raise the very ground under Helblindi’s steps, and he almost stumbles backward along the slope.

“But,” Helblindi says, “you are all right with meeting with our mother. Our brother shouldn’t be any less, should he?”

“I haven’t got brothers,” Loki says. “I’ve only got—”

And he stops, tangled in the words he was about to say without thinking first through them. He swallows them down quickly, as if he is a schoolboy caught red-handed with a condemning morsel of a forbidden sweet before supper. Thor is no closer to his brother than Helblindi is—he wants neither of them, or he shouldn’t, for one is a false brother and another is a Frost Giant stranger, and he wants to hit himself for thinking he could pick and choose when neither is true.

“Do you think I’m some beast you’ve caught for fun?” Loki says. He doesn’t know why his stomach turns while it sinks, like a drowning man struggling for one last chance for survival. “So you can—you can parade me through town and show me off?”

Helblindi’s shoulders stiffen. His eye contact with Loki slips and slides away, like curds of soap squirming out of the way when two fingers try to catch them.

“I do not—” Helblindi stutters with his words, which he so easily crafted earlier like they were marble and he a sculptor. “Please, you needn’t be so—I don’t know. I do not understand. Please, calm down. Don’t be—I never took you to be—”

“Never took me to be what?” Loki says.

Helblindi shakes his head.

“Forgive me,” Helblindi says. “That is out of my place.”

“ _What_ , exactly?” Loki says.

But Helblindi has already turned and continued walking, as if this conversation had never taken place. Loki stays rooted in his place, but only for a moment, before the wind chills him and he follows. With Helblindi’s towering size and Loki’s steps needing to double just to cover the same distance as his Jotun brother, Loki felt a little more than a toddler.

“You will like him,” Helblindi finally speaks up after a stretch of silence. His words are more hesitant, as if he is trying to rouse a cantankerous infant. “You won’t regret meeting him.”

Helblindi takes Loki to a small clearing on the hillside that lies beside the town. It overlooks a fjord of electric blue water, pale with ice along the banks and deeply rich, like velvet, beyond the shores. The sight startles Loki, and he cannot help but wonder if Jotunheim has annexed some other realm into its dark grotto to behold such a thing. It isn’t an ugly view.

“He must be here somewhere,” Helblindi says. “The foxes’ den is about here.”

“If you had explained earlier that by ‘brother’ you meant a pet fox, I wouldn’t have protested as loudly,” Loki says.

Helblindi shakes his head at Loki.

“Are you naturally this insufferable, or is everyone raised like that in Asgard?” says Helblindi.

Both are viable answers.

“There!” Helblindi says. Whatever annoyance Loki had finally managed to wring upon him is immediately dismissed. He nods fervently to Loki. “Come on, then.”

Loki walks no faster as Helblindi runs forward. Sitting on a fallen tree is a figure—willowy, almost elongated like someone had taken to ends of a roll of dough and stretched it out until it was much too thin and they ought to start over. Laid out beside the Jotun is a cloak, and several daggers and swords resting upon it. Unlike Helblindi, his head is cleanly shaven, and the lines along his scalp are lined with metal, like an inborn helmet.

“Byleistr!” Helblindi says. He kneels behind the Jotun, pressing two fingers against his. “Brother, have you gone already into the forests? You look like you’ve been idle for hours.”

Byleistr turns his face. Loki feels his heart jump up into his throat—for a moment, he had caught a glimpse of who he might have been if Odin had never took him. The gaunt, hollowed face and the wide eyes make him think too much of a mirror, and Loki’s hands under his gloves grow clammy. He had never looked upon his reflection when he shapeshifted to his Jotun form before, after all.

“It was a fair enough skirmish,” Byleistr says. “It lasted a little longer than half an hour.”

He looks back down at his knives as he rubs handfuls of snow along the blade. The fur around his neck squirms—Loki stares long at it until he realizes that it isn’t a cloak or a scarf, like what Helblindi wears, but an arctic fox. Its fur is blotchy, black and white and gray, as if it has gotten sooty throughout the day and is waiting its turn to be cleaned.

“Your soldiers have dealt with those bilgesnipe hoards then?” Helblindi says.

“Enough to keep the townspeople at ease,” Byleistr says. Where Helblindi’s voice can easily careen through a crowd of any noise, each word Byleistr speaks is a miniature glass figurine falling from his mouth, as if he picks out each syllable with a pair of sugar tongs. “The beasts ought to be quieter nowadays.”

He cleans one of his knives against the snow. It occurs to Loki that the entire patch of snow at Byleistr’s feet is a deep red, as if he has a plush rug unfurled before him while he speaks calmly about a mildly satisfying battle. He almost laughs out loud—had it been Thor, bards would be singing about this event already.

Byleistr looks up. His eyes catch onto Loki’s and immediately he stands up, sword in hand. Before Loki can lift his hand—to protect himself, to cast seidr, to declare himself unarmed, Loki does not know—Byleistr has already taken the five strides he needs to reach Loki and has thrown him to the ground.

The back of Loki’s head meets ice and rock and he cannot stop the gasp of pain that escapes him as his head spins—he cannot tell up from down or left from right as he is blinded from the blow. If Byleistr had meant to pin him to the ground, take his knife and slit Loki’s throat, Helblindi rudely interrupts.

“Byleistr, stop!” Helblindi immediately stands between Byleistr and Loki, hands held out to block Byleistr’s sword. Loki tries to sit up, but his head pounds and he clenches his teeth to keep from groaning. “What are you doing?”

“He’s the AEsir,” Byleistr says. He speaks evenly, as if he had not just thrown Loki headfirst into the ground. “He was the one who crawled between realms and lured some of ours into Asgard to be slaughtered. I recognize him!”

Loki laughs into the snow. Byleistr tries to lunge again, but Helblindi is much broader than him, and catches his wrists.

“Please, hear him out,” Helblindi says. “I promise, he is not here to bring harm to Jotunheim—”

“He has done nothing _but_.”

“He is here under my eye,” Helblindi says, with a sudden change in authority. “I wouldn’t let danger freely roam around Jotunheim, would I?”

Byleistr says nothing, only to gesticulate sharply at Loki as if he is the epitome of danger to Jotunheim, which—to give Byleistr credit—is not entirely untrue.

“What does he have to say?” Byleistr says.

Loki pushes himself up from the ground, the back of his head unusually warm.

“Odin must have picked Thor up from this wasteland as a runt as well,” Loki says through clenched teeth. It hurts to blink. “He’s just as brutish as your kind.”

Byleistr silences immediately, his arms falling to his side. Helblindi steps back, looking even more distressed than before as Byleistr quietly stands still, watching Loki with such a red gaze that Loki swears he is trying to melt the snow around him in order to drown him.

“That is terribly unkind of you to say to your brother, Loki,” Helblindi says.

It amazes Loki how poorly Jotunheim can take a mere insult, as if it is a condemnation to the gallows rather than a fair fight. Helblindi is even wiping his eyes with the back of his hands, teary-eyed even, like a shameless ergi. And here Loki had thought Thor breaking a Jotun’s jaw because of the taunt ‘princess’ was ridiculous back then.

At the word ‘brother,’ Byleistr swallows; Loki can see his throat move, and nothing else of him follow. He sheaths his blade in a leather scabbard and places it at his hip. If Loki could shake the dizziness out from behind his eyes, he reckons that he could see Byleistr wish death upon their entire family tree to avoid this association.

“So that’s why you let him here,” Byleistr says.

Helblindi’s eyes still shine with some excessive sadness. Still, he reaches a hand out to Loki. Loki shakes his head and pushes himself off the ground. His head feels light and heavy all at once—he feels like reeling forward.

“He’s come back, Byleistr,” Helblindi says. “Didn’t we say that he would, one day? And here he is—do not push him about and bind his hands, he is no prisoner to us.”

“How is he a brother?” Byleistr says. He raises a hand to Loki. “He is in AEsir skin.”

“With a perfectly functioning AEsir tongue and pair of ears,” Loki says. His ears are ringing, but he ignores that.

Byleistr reaches a hand to touch Loki’s cheek. Loki jerks back and immediately wishes he did not. He nearly falls backward.

“Afraid of a chill?” Byleistr says. Loki doesn’t miss the bite. “Where is your skin then?”

“Upon me, right now,” Loki says.

“He’s a shapeshifter, brother,” Helblindi says. “Like Grandfather was.”

Byleistr forcefully grabs Loki’s chin. His hands are calloused and ungenerous—Loki pulls away, but he can see the change in his skin in the way Byleistr’s eyes flash.

“Don’t you know it’s dangerous for AEsir skin to walk around Jotunheim now?” Byleistr says.

“I’m not exactly secure walking anywhere in the Nine Realms in any skin,” Loki says.

Byleistr’s jaw sets. He bends down to scoop up the arctic fox, who had gathered at his ankles all this time, and turns away, striding back to his post at the fallen log without another word.

“Byleistr,” Helblindi says. Loki reaches to the back of his head. It throbs. “Let’s bring our brother to Mother.”

“My brother is not an AEsir,” Byleistr says. He sits down stiffly onto the log again, swiping his blades onto the snow with a more fiery vigor. “I’m currently busy, Helblindi. Do whatever you need yourself.”

“He is not an AEsir!” Helblindi says. “He is a Jotun, like you and me. He only wears a fake skin—”

Loki doesn’t know why, but those words twist in him like fraying wire.

“What Jotun wears pale skin like that?” Byleistr says.

“What fox has black fur at this time of the year?” says Helblindi. “That doesn’t make it any less of a fox.”

“They have no _choice_ ,” spits Byleistr.

Loki pulls his hand back from behind his head. It registers in his mind slowly that that is blood on his gloves. Another pang of pain wracks his head and he falls to his knees.

“Loki?”

Helblindi swiftly comes to Loki’s side, hand falling on Loki’s shoulder. Loki jerks, but cannot pull away as quickly. Even Byleistr turns toward them again, his protests dwindling steadily.

“I’m let down,” Loki says breathlessly. “You should have shoved me harder.” 

Helblindi’s arms keep him from falling forward. Byleistr rises to his feet slowly, uncertain. The fox in his hand watches—or maybe it watches the blood dripping down Loki’s neck, from his glove, into the snow, and painting feasts.

“Now are you content?” Helblindi shoots at Byleistr.

He pulls Loki back onto his feet. Loki blinks, trying to make sense of the haze. His feet slip on the ice underneath him. Helblindi catches him immediately.

“I did not mean…”

Byleistr trails off before pressing his lips into a thin line. He scoops his cloak and weapons from the ground and hoists them over his shoulders. The fox slips out of his grip and tails him. In Loki’s blurring vision, it is nothing more but a disembodied black and white smudge in the bluish ice.

“He is of seidr, isn’t he?” says Byleistr. Loki does not know how old this Jotun is—if he is an older blood brother or younger, if he is mature or immature, strong or weak, but in this moment he has such a childish panic in his words that Loki is fascinated. “Won’t he just heal himself?”

Loki laughs. It wracks his head even more, and he sways.

“What a stupid idea,” he says.

Byleistr and Helblindi exchange a stricken look. Byleistr lets out a frustrated growl before roughly taking one of Loki’s arms, while Helblindi clutches onto the other, to lend a haphazard support. Loki is nearly lifted off the ground from their height, which they may as well do, since his feet drag underneath.

Byleistr says something that Loki doesn’t catch. There is fog in his ears.

“Maybe it’s an Asgardian thing,” Helblindi says.

But I am no Asgardian anymore, Loki would say, except he would rather close his eyes, just for a little bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it to the end of this chapter, once again I say, the Lord in heaven bless you, because I know this story isn't as enticing or satisfying as other Loki-centric fics, but it's definitely one that is near and dear to my heart already and I have a passion for. And if anything, this story can arguably be a semi-related prequel for a new Loki angst fic that is currently in the secret files and will be fleshed out once I've watched Age of Ultron. And hark, it would actually have a plot and Avenger interaction. Consider it your reward for bearing with me through this weaving of a new myth.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for your encouragement and for reading this story!! You guys have been absolutely so sweet to me and my self-deprecation. I really do have the absolutely kindest and best readers. I hope you enjoy this chapter!
> 
> And as a note, this story does in fact take place after Avengers: Age of Ultron. That in itself is not explicitly relevant to this particular story, but it might in potential follow-ups. Thanks again!

Loki wakes to a cold sensation on the back of his head, and careful fingers. They don’t pull at his hair, or press too close to the wound. His heart skips a beat, before it sinks like a stone, when he remembers that it cannot be Frigga.

He wishes he could go back to sleep, but a thought strikes his mind and he jerks, as if the hand is suddenly very hot against his skin. He feels the hand pull away and his breath hitches.

“Loki?” Helblindi says.

Loki doesn’t know how to explain why he feels a strange sense of quietness descend on him, some disappointment. He doesn’t know who he was expecting. There is no Frigga here, nor there, nor anywhere really, but after his initial shock, he knows that it is not Frigga he is waiting for.

“Am I dying yet?” Loki says into the pillow.

The pillow is wrapped in fur. Loki runs his hand over it. It is soft, and smells of mint.

“No,” says Helblindi. “Stay still. I’m almost done.”

“Don’t bother,” Loki says. “I can handle bruises and broken bones.”

He reaches a hand to touch the back of his head. Helblindi brushes it away.

“I’m still molding the skin together,” says Helblindi.

“Using what?”

“Ice seidr,” says Helblindi.

Loki blinks. His sight clears, but there is still a dull pounding in his head.

“Wouldn’t a healing stone be quicker?” he says.

“We don’t use healing stones,” Helblindi says.

“Why not?”

“Because this works just as well,” Helblindi says. He rubs small circles into the back of Loki’s head. It’s strangely comforting, but Loki wishes he could pull away. “After all, you’re not dead now, are you?”

“Was that a concern?” Loki says.

He tries to sit up. Helblindi puts a large hand on Loki’s shoulder to keep him from rising.

“We apologize for your injury,” Helblindi says. “Byleistr is more used to combat than—brotherly fisticuffing.”

Loki snorts. Helblindi gives something of a sheepish sigh.

“How are you feeling?” he says.

“Fine,” Loki says. “I’ve dealt with worse.”

“You fell senseless,” says Helblindi.

“No I wasn’t. I just simply felt like making you lot carry me.”

Helblindi flicks him on the cheek. Loki pulls away quickly, holding out a hand as if to hit Helblindi’s hand away. Helblindi holds up both hands in surrender.

“I meant no insult,” Helblindi says.

“I know you did not,” Loki says.

He turns his back toward Helblindi again, his spine prickling as if something fearful lurks behind him, and if he looks behind his shoulder he will be face-to-face with it for sure. There is no evil spirit, or hungry bilgesnipe, or The Other leering with an outstretched hand toward him—just a stranger, with familiar hands.

“I’m almost finished,” Helblindi says, between the silence. “I just need to give you one last blessing.”

“Don’t waste it,” says Loki.

“Such pride you have!” Helblindi says. “You must receive Ymir’s blessing.”

“I don’t take things from strangers,” says Loki.

“Ymir is no stranger,” Helblindi says. What sounds like a mortar and pestle grinds behind him. “They will protect your wound from further harm.”

Before Loki could respond, he feels a strange sensation as Helblindi applies something of a paste—or is it ice?—upon the back of his head. Instead of crisp coldness, as he would suspect from snow, it is soft, almost airy to texture, and sinks into his skin like foam. His hand flies to the back of his hair immediately, expecting to find suds clinging to his hair, but other than being slightly damp there is nothing.

Helblindi murmurs behind him. At first Loki thinks he is speaking to him, before he understands that it is something of a prayer, a ritual.

“I don’t think the Norns would take kindly to your seeking of someone else’s authority,” Loki says.

“The Norns?” Helblindi says. “Oh—no, but we do not exactly think of the Norns.”

Loki turns to Helblindi, raising an eyebrow.

“That comment would deserve an entire horse sacrifice from you,” Loki says. “Unless you want demise and desolation for your fate, then by all means.”

“That’s what the Asgardians do to temper karma, isn’t it?” Helblindi says. He gives a wry smile. “Mother once said that Asgardians believe that the Norns live among them, on Asgard. Their gods, living right next door to them! Do they really think so?”

“In Nornheim,” Loki says, bemused that this fact is considered fable. He shakes his head. “That’s beside the point now. She has been to Asgard before?”

“Not since the war,” Helblindi says. “I have too. We once were found favorable by your Bifrost, a long time ago. Can’t say any of us are allowed to venture elsewhere without—how do they put it?—strict Asgardian permission since.”

He offers a weary smile before shrugging.

“What was she doing in Asgard?” Loki says. Helblindi’s mother is a queen of Jotunheim—were there diplomatic meetings between Asgard and Jotunheim before the war ripped everything apart? Did Frigga and this other mother once meet?

“Drink this,” Helblindi says, lifting up a stone cup.

“What for?”

“You’ve never had it before?” Helblindi says, eyes wide in surprise. “It’ll balance your health. Your head can only heal if the rest of your body is well.”

The content of the cup is a strange, almost sparkling liquid, like silver watered down. Loki looks down at the cup and back up to Helblindi. Helblindi gives a patient sigh.

“It _will_ help your health, you know,” Helblindi says. “Even if you do not understand how.”

“I feel that healing stones would have just gotten the job done much more quickly,” Loki says.

“It will only mend your bones and veins and skin,” Helblindi says. “But you’ve still been misbalanced. Your health has been thrown out of concord. What can healing stones do for that?”

“Let me stand on my feet, I can assure you I would not topple like I stand in string,” says Loki.

“I’m a master healer,” Helblindi says testily. “I’ve dealt with cities plagued with epidemics. Don’t be mistaken into thinking I cannot handle you.”

“Ah, but I have one thing that your diseased masses do not,” says Loki.

“And what is that?” says Helblindi.

A death wish, Loki thinks.

Instead, he says, “No allegiance to you.”

“Then,” says Helblindi. “That is something that my people _do_ have…and a thing that you do not.”

Loki turns onto his back and lets out a long sigh.

“Just drink the bloody elixir,” Helblindi says.

“I don’t take superstition,” Loki says.

“Oh, is that what you think it is?” Helblindi says. “Just superstition? Then it should do you no harm if you just take it.”

“My pride is not that easily challenged,” Loki says.

“Rumour has it that you have no qualms in making bets,” says Helblindi.

“I’ve long given up the habit,” Loki says. He raises an eyebrow at Helblindi. “Where did you even hear this?”

“You seem surprised that I know of Asgard’s prince’s reputation,” Helblindi says. “Jotunheim is limited and under Asgard’s lock and key. We aren’t under a rock.”

The corner of Loki’s lip twitches upward.

“So…” Helblindi lifts the stone cup higher. Loki makes a face. “Listen, our highest order of master healer had created this elixir herself. Will you not trust that?”

“You don’t even trust healing stones,” Loki says.

“Because they condition the body to be dependent for healing,” says Helblindi. When Loki does not budge, Helblindi adds, “Does it help if our healer had studied all around the other realms to come to this elixir?”

“I thought Jotunheim hasn’t been allowed outside of their realms since over a millennium ago,” says Loki.

“I told you that our mother travelled outside of Jotunheim all the time, did I not?” Helblindi says.

Loki pauses. He does not expect this to make a considerable difference.

“Did she make this?” he says. “Herself?”

“She’s taught others to recreate it, you know,” Helblindi says.

That is none of Loki’s concern. He looks down at the cup again. One facet is that a Jotun healer of whatever Jotun science and knowledge concocted this solution—another facet is that it makes Loki think of when he used to be ill, and Frigga boiled Idunn’s apples to make a broth for him. There were many healers and cooks in the castle, but she brewed it herself, even if the realm was in an uproar. Mother will take care of you, child, she had said when she did. She’ll make you feel better.

It is not with those hands that made whatever this Jotun potion is, with hands that would wipe Loki’s feverish forehead or rub his back when he could not sleep. They could have been, in another life, but they are not. But Loki takes the cup anyway.

“If it does something for you,” Helblindi says. “Then you must give me five truths.”

“Five truths?” says Loki.

“Yes,” Helblindi. “About yourself. You must answer each question I ask you honestly.”

“Fine,” Loki says easily. He reckons Helblindi would be satisfied with any answer Loki gives so long as it is coherent. “If it does nothing for me, however, then you must give me five lies.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” says Helblindi.

Loki cocks an eyebrow.

“Five lies,” Loki repeats. “Whatever you say, shall I demand it to be a lie, then it shall be untrue. And you must not insist that it is otherwise.”

“Well, fine,” Helblindi says. “I don’t see why that matters to you so much.”

Loki looks down into the cup again. He is not a picky eater, so to speak—he has been in enough situations, on the war front, in the Void, et cetera, where anything he can chew is a blessing from the Norns, but in all his years of venturing or being dragged around the Nine Realms with Thor on some needless and unproductive hunting trip, Jotunheim has never been a feasting location.

Helblindi pours himself a cup—it smells of cloudberry juice. He clinks his cup against Loki’s—Loki does not understand for what reason.

“To your health,” Helblindi says.

Loki lifts his own in an Asgardian toast. He takes a breath and downs it in one swallow—the worst case scenario is that it is poisoned, and really, it is not the worst case. It is sleek on his teeth—it nearly slips down his throat without his permission. It sends shivers down his spine and he coughs.

“You needn’t drink it all at once,” Helblindi says.

Loki wipes his lips with the back of his hand. It is warm coming down his throat, not burning like mead, but like relief that stills the stomach from anxious butterflies and sets the heart at an easy languor, and blankets set over his shoulders. Like a welcoming comfort, that isn’t unfamiliar. It makes him cough again into his arm.

“Easy,” Helblindi says.

Loki lowers his cup. His head no longer throbs. He looks down into his cup—empty, now—and wonders if like many other medicines anyone has ever grown addicted to it.

“Well?” Helblindi says. “Do you feel it?”

“No,” Loki says. He swallows again—he still tastes whispers of it on the roof of his mouth. “Seems like you were mistaken.”

“Nothing at all?” Helblindi says.

There’s a laugh that tickles his voice. Loki feels as if he ages backwards in Helblindi’s presence.

“I’m afraid this magical elixir of yours can only do so much as to quench my thirst,” Loki says, tossing the cup aside. “It was a good attempt.”

“Only quenched your thirst?” Helblindi says.

“Easy on your iterations,” Loki says. “I said it already, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” Helblindi says. “But quenching your thirst means the drink really has done something for you, hasn’t it?”

Loki opens his mouth, then closes it. Helblindi raises his eyebrows.

“Begging your pardon,” he says. “But one does not bet that the sun will shine in the sky the next day and still collect their winnings when it storms because the sun shines behind an obstacle course of clouds.”

“Oh, like you wouldn’t,” says Helblindi.

“Who are you to say that?” Loki says.

“Five lies?” Helblindi says. “Your bet for me to recant five statements I will make? If you do not play with your words as children with their food I shall scarcely trust words I hear.”

Loki scoffs.

“Those are childish games,” he says.

“I thought you are an infamous Trickster,” says Helblindi.

“I was,” Loki says. “I’ve gotten a bit too busy over the past couple of years to play anymore.”

“How so?” Helblindi says.

Loki smiles wryly.

“Come now,” Loki says. “Even a child has to give up his toys.”

Helblindi returns the smile, more genuinely.

“Let’s call it a draw,” he says.

He says it like a parent humoring a child—yes, of course your imaginary friend wants a lingonberry pastry too. Loki almost protests, but the door opens.

Loki does not know who he expected, even though his stomach swoops and he feels his palms sweat. He just knows that this sudden tension in his chest is not for Byleistr, who is the one walking through the door.

Loki sits up straighter, back against the wall. Byleistr is holding a bundle wrapped in a deep purple cloth. The sooty arctic fox dances at his ankles, omnipresent. Byleistr only spares Loki a brief glance before turning directly to his brother.

“I don’t see why an entire feast is necessary,” Byleistr says.

“A full stomach is necessary,” Helblindi says. “And he must have travelled long. You’ve travelled long, haven’t you?” he says to Loki. “When was the last time you have eaten?”

Loki shrugs. He doesn’t remember.

“Asgard, I would say,” he says.

“See,” Byleistr says mildly. “Then it hasn’t been that long. He just got here.”

Loki nods absentmindedly. Helblindi raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.

“Regardless, it doesn’t hurt to eat,” Helblindi says. “Are you feeling well enough to eat?”

“I’m not a broken doll,” Loki says.

“You were close enough to a ragdoll,” says Byleistr.

Loki’s cheeks burn.

“That wasn’t exactly my fault,” Loki says.

Helblindi takes Byleistr’s bundle and lays it out on a low table in the room. The arctic fox leaps onto the table, pawing at the knot that Byleistr tied with the corners of the cloth. Byleistr scoops it up with his hand and lets it clamber over his sloping shoulders like a bird.

“Strange choice for a pet,” Loki says.

“Lohtu is not a pet,” Byleistr says. In his bundle, there are strips of what looks like small slabs of meat, white crustless buns, and cloudberries. Byleistr makes great effort rearranging the few buns in proper order on the plate to not look up. “She’s a friend.”

“Beasts of the same temper flock together,” Loki says.

Byleistr stands up and strides straight to the door. Helblindi immediately takes Byleistr’s hand before he could leave.

“Byleistr, please,” Helblindi says.

“I’m not hungry,” Byleistr says. “I only brought it for your guest.”

Helblindi looks from Byleistr to Loki, with a strained panic in his eyes that Loki finds strangely misplaced on the red eyes of a Jotun.

“Sit and eat with us,” Helblindi says. “Just for a little while.”

Byleistr turns sharply toward them.

“Does this brother of yours not break your heart?” Byleistr says. “Not even a little?”

Even when neither of them are looking at him, Loki cannot help but suddenly feel very exposed, as if he is set on a pedestal and argued and examined like a piece of scientific enigma, or a culprit before the judging king waiting for his sentence.

“I—” Helblindi purses his lips, giving Loki a small nod as if in apology. “Of course he does. I mean, you do.  Your words are saddening, and I don’t understand why you say the words you do.”

Loki ought to laugh, because Norns only know why the Frost Giants don’t see why he would say such things about them, but he finds that he can’t quite let it out, or even smile for that matter. He ought to shake his head at the likes of Helblindi for being such an ergi about heartaches, except he didn’t expect for such shameless confessions to, without rhyme or warning, make him wish he hadn’t said anything at all.

“It isn’t hard to guess why he does,” Byleistr says.

He beckons at the arctic fox to follow him. The silence between all three of them in the room is so frigid and unyielding that they all might as well have been frozen in a block of ice. It isn’t quite the fire and brimstone that Loki knows in Thor.

“Wait,” Loki says. His heart forgets a beat. “I spoke out of turn.”

It isn’t quite an apology, and Loki does not know if he means for it to be. Whatever it is, it is not easy to come out of his mouth, but it leaves his lips anyway.

Byleistr looks over his shoulder towards Loki. The way his eyebrows are raised, he seems just as surprised as Loki is that Loki speaks up at all. Helblindi is holding his breath; Loki can see the ways his fingers dig into his knees. Loki wonders how still he must stand until the icy silence would thaw out.

“Well, brother?” Byleistr says to Helblindi. “He’s apologizing to you. Your call.”

Loki opens his mouth to retort, but resigns. Helblindi purses his lips and then nods shortly.

“Please,” he says, “come eat with us.”

Loki doesn’t know if he can move yet—the ice doesn’t feel any less stiff.

“You too, Byleistr,” Helblindi says. “Please, you need to eat anyway.”

What is surprising isn’t that Byleistr hasn’t already run out of the room, but that he—albeit with a throbbing vein on the side of his neck—stiffly sits down at the table next to Helblindi. Helblindi then turns hopefully to Loki.

“I am not hungry,” says Loki.

“But you could still sit with us,” Helblindi says.

“I don’t need to intrude further upon your hospitality,” Loki says.

“If he didn’t want you to intrude upon it, he wouldn’t give any to you at all,” Byleistr says.

Loki jolts with surprise, as if Byleistr’s ice pick syllables prick him on his sides. He slowly slides out of the bed and kneels at the table with Helblindi and Byleistr—the table that is low for the Jotun reaches Loki’s chest when he is on his knees. He feels grossly like an infant.

Helblindi takes one of the soft steamed buns and hands one to Loki, one to Byleistr. They are light and pillowy, fitting perfectly in Loki’s palm. Byleistr does the same with what looks like smoked fish—the largest piece for Helblindi (albeit only as long as his finger), a large piece for Loki, and leaving behind a smaller strip of fish, thin like hair.

“No, no, no,” Helblindi says. He passes his piece of the fish to Byleistr. “You’re the youngest, you need a better share.”

“You are the eldest,” says Byleistr, passing a piece of dark meat to Helblindi. It is thick and sizzling on the hot rock plate. As it passes, the steam coming from it scorches Loki’s face. “Only the best for you.”

Loki cannot help but think that if Thor is the one sitting at the table, he would have already inhaled whatever is presented in front him. He only sits quietly, watching Helblindi and Byleistr bicker over whoever eats the poorest of these, half curious and half fascinated.

“But we have a guest,” Helblindi says, so smoothly that this all sounds rehearsed. He pushes the rejected, finest cut of meat to Loki. Loki leans back, as if to distance himself from this matter. “Our guest should have nothing but the best.”

“I’m not hungry,” Loki says. “I do not need it.”

He had thought that refusal of the best of the food is the expected answer, which is why the stunned stares from Helblindi and Byleistr throw Loki off balance. The two of them look just as nonplussed as he, as if someone has accidentally said the wrong line in a performance and everyone thus forgets their subsequent parts.

“I mean,” he says slowly, when Helblindi fidgets and Byleistr looks even more disgruntled than Loki thought any living creature could possibly muster. After the stony silence just previously experienced, Loki would rather opt not to go through that again. He pushes the plate to Byleistr. “You are the youngest. You should take it.”

Byleistr jerks back from Loki’s offer, as if he finds it entirely unacceptable.

“That isn’t fair,” Byleistr says. “He’s an Asgardian. He doesn’t even know what he’s talking about.”

“Just take the muskox, brother,” Helblindi says. He scoops a handful of bulbous orange-gold cloudberries, swollen with juice until they are fit to burst, and pours it into Loki’s bowl. “Here, take all of these. You are our guest.”

The process continues for another good six minutes, despite there only being a small bit of food from the bundle, and Loki realizes why the stone plate that holds the muskox meat is so hot, since by the time any of them can actually taste the meat it perfectly does not burn the tongue. At one point Loki had wondered how tactful it would be to throw the cloudberries at Helblindi just to force him to keep them for himself.

“I don’t suppose you have very good muskox in Asgard, do you?” Helblindi says.

Byleistr is feedings bits of his muskox to the arctic fox, who is curled up on his lap. Loki doesn’t know if the fourth dinner guest is a secret or not, but he reckons he is the only one who can easily tell since out of the three of them he is the one with the hardest time seeing over the damn table.

“Do they even have muskox?” Byleistr says to the floor.

“How do you like it?” Helblindi says.

The meat is cooked heavily with spices. The taste itself is decent enough, if the sensation isn’t like swallowing a mouthful of angry stinging bees. Loki nods, rather than say anything at all, just to keep his tongue from peeling.

“Ymir has been good to us,” Helblindi says. “Even after the Bifröst, we can be fed.”

The entire meal, while Loki could consider it a decent enough size to at least cover a plate and make it not look pitiful, compared to the much taller Jotun must be miniscule. Even Thor’s hunger would hardly be affected if he finished all three of their share in one sitting.

“Were you not fed before?” Loki says.

Helblindi smiles briefly, pinching off pieces of his bun.

“It was challenging at times,” Helblindi says. “After the war, especially.” He nods to Byleistr, who picks at his smoked fish. “Jotun born after the war, like Byleistr, are slighter. Though, I can’t say it is of much damage. He makes a fine military commander.”

Byleistr carries on as if he has not been both undermined and complimented. Loki looks down at the plate, which could possibly fill him up; if Helblindi and Byleistr are of royalty, would that mean the common Jotun eat less or just as much?

“Was there a famine?” Loki says.

“You didn’t know?” Helblindi says.

“Why would I?” Loki says.

“Asgard’s the ruler of all the realms, are they not?” Byleistr says. “Or are they content with the title and not the responsibility?”

“What is Jotunheim’s business to Asgard?” Loki says.

Byleistr’s eyebrow twitches, but he says nothing. Helblindi gives a small sigh.

“Well, all our sources were used up in the war,” Helblindi says. “And after losing so much during the war, it hasn’t been—things have been challenging.”

He pinches off another bite of the bun. Compared to Jotun-sized hand, the bun is hardly bigger than a coin, and yet it is an amount of luxury.

“But,” Helblindi says, with another smile—they come so easily that Loki wonders if that is merely Helblindi’s resting face, “you have returned to Jotunheim, and it is a thing to celebrate.”

Loki doesn’t suppose that Jotunheim has had much to celebrate if his sudden appearance is something to eat rare muskox and cloudberries for. Byleistr, who has avoided eye contact with Loki this entire time, probably has the same sentiments.

“I suppose at the very least Jotunheim did not starve to death,” Loki says.

Helblindi tilted his head—or rather, jerked it to the side, as if to assure Loki that he is not ignoring his statement without really giving an answer to it. Byleistr has fed his entire slab of fish to the arctic fox by now, who now bats around the bones.

“Not technically, no,” says Helblindi. “We do miss the meat jelly from Nidavellir though.”

“The dwarf goods?” Loki says. “They’re nothing but seasoning. Jotunheim cannot afford it?”

“I know,” Helblindi says. “But it’s been a while since I’ve last had it. I mean, Byleistr doesn’t even know what I talk about.”

“Whatever it is, it sounds muskox belly,” Byleistr says.

“It’s very much different from that,” Helblindi says.

The arctic fox hops from Byleistr’s lap onto the table, sending cloudberries spilling onto the ground. Loki frowns at it. Byleistr whistles to it; he tosses it a piece of his bun and it snaps its jaws at it from the air.

“Shouldn’t foxes hunt for their own food?” says Loki.

“Lohtu isn’t wild,” says Byleistr. “Nor is she a hunting dog.”

“Then what’s the use?” says Loki.

“I don’t suppose Asgardians understand the concept of not enslaving everything of another race or being,” Byleistr says.

Loki raises an eyebrow.

“Animals are hardly slaves as much as they are animals,” Loki says.

“I fear what you Asgardians consider as animals, then,” Byleistr says.

He carefully places cloudberries on his tongue, one at a time. Loki is surprised that he isn’t tearing into his meat just to let off some of his own steam.

“If you are angry,” Loki says. “I would rather we just get through a flyting match—or even a fight to the death if you prefer—than to just sit here and wait for you to explode.”

Byleistr drops his bowl of cloudberries; it clatters on the ground and is immediately claimed by the fox kit. Even Helblindi looks horrified, hand halfway reaching for his cup. Loki’s breath hitches—he is not accustomed to saying the wrong words.

“Have you no shame?” Byleistr says. “Why on earth would you suggest that?”

“Because I’d rather sit through a storm than wait for one,” Loki says, both indignant and nonplussed.

“What storm are you even speaking of?” Byleistr says.

“You’re not actually suggesting that you aren’t the least bit incensed with me, are you?” says Loki.

“Please, Loki,” Helblindi says. His lips are pressed to a thin line—any more and Loki reckons the flesh will just meld together permanently. “Would it truly pain you to show a little more respect?”

“One would argue I haven’t shown anyone respect in centuries,” Loki says, if Thanos and fear do not count.

“And it would kill you to start, wouldn’t it?” Byleistr says.

“Let’s at least finish eating, shan’t we?” Helblindi says.

His hands shuffle nervously through the food, as if his plans are all going astray before his eyes. If what Helblindi had yearned for was some reunion of a meal to give the impression of familial relations, Loki would have to say that he now has a rather accurate experience of one right now.

“Eat?” says Byleistr. “When he accuses me of being a berserker?”

“A berserker?” At this, Loki laughs hard. He clutches his sides, just at the thought of it. “You, a berserker?”

His humour does not seem to catch on, while Byleistr and Helblindi stare on stonily. His laughter fades off, like a clumsily aimed arrow that miserably lands ten feet before the target.

“You don’t actually believe that I think you a berserker, do you?” he says. “Even Thor would not be considered a berserker. And he could tear me in two just with his voice.”

“The crown prince?” Helblindi says. “He would show such anger? To _you_?”

Loki is beginning to realise that they are not on the same page.

“He’d be dishonored if he did not,” Loki says. He runs a hand over his arm, as if to assure himself. “Why would he hide it?”

“How does your realm stay put when he does?” Byleistr says. “How does your family not fall apart if he so freely declares his anger?”

Loki hesitates. He sees no point in correcting Byleistr.

“And how do you stay sane if you do not?” says Loki.

Anger is power, anger is demand and command. Anger is what makes warriors take their swords and run it through tens of their enemies, what gives the king voice and a mighty fist, and these Jotun try to shrivel it up in their cold frost.

“It must be an Asgardian thing,” Helblindi says to Byleistr, pressing his fingertips on Byleistr’s arm in some comforting gesture. “He must mean no harm.”

“I should have gathered that myself,” Byleistr says. “Considering Asgard’s crown prince kills upon simple slights.”

The corner of Loki’s lip twitches, without humor. It’s a strange memory to recall, one that once gave Loki so much exasperation and fury against Thor. Now it seems like a distant, half-remembered dream, a small, old scar underneath newer, rotting wounds that he has almost forgotten where it came from.

The thought makes his chest hurt, but it isn’t because he recalls Thor’s coronation day.

“He is an angry fool,” Loki says. “But he isn’t reckless with it anymore. No, it is quite deserved.”

The words make his chest hurt, but it isn’t entirely because of want.

Helblindi watches Loki strangely. Loki clears his throat and takes a bite of the bun. It is unfamiliarly soft, without grain or crust. It sticks to the roof of his mouth.

“That sounds awful,” Byleistr says.

Loki shrugs.

“By all means, I’m not unfamiliar,” Loki says. “I can’t imagine your ‘berserker’ anger will shake me.”

“I wouldn’t have much to lose if I did, would I?” Byleistr says. “There’s nothing to break.”

“Byleistr,” Helblindi says. “You know that isn’t true.”

“You know that is,” Byleistr says.

He rises to his feet, brushing the crumbs that his fox had left on his lap into his hand. If Byleistr in some other life is Loki’s younger brother, and small for Jotun standards, he towers over Loki.

“Thank you for your company during this meal,” Byleistr says. “I should go back to my duties.”

Helblindi sighs. Loki does not know whether to acknowledge Byleistr’s departure; he reckons if he even tries to do so much as wave goodbye he will still do something unacceptable.

“At least take a bite of your own meal?” Helblindi says.

Byleistr takes up the hot plate of the muskox and shrugs before leaving the room. He lets the door slap shut behind him, but not before letting his furry companion catch up with him. When the door resounds, Helblindi’s shoulders droop.

“At least he took it with him,” he says.

“He will probably feed it to his shadow,” Loki says.

Helblindi makes a face.

“I wish that he wouldn’t,” Helblindi says.

“You let a wild animal just roam around?” says Loki.

“She isn’t just a wild animal,” Helblindi says. “She is Byleistr’s comfort. It might not be so apparent, but she has done much for his melancholy.”

“Melancholy?”

Helblindi nods. Loki feels his stomach turn just listening, as if he is almost embarrassed for Byleistr, that he has such an affliction, or that his brother would speak so freely about it at all. He pretends to be distracted by bits of stem still stuck on his cloudberries as to not listen too intently.

“It’s very unfortunate, but he’s getting by,” Helblindi says. “Though, to be fair, perhaps it is of at least some optimism that you rile him so much. At least so that he experiences more emotion than just low listlessness.”

“He would probably experience more of that if he realizes that you are telling me of it,” Loki says.

“He would not,” Helblindi says. When Loki looks sharply at him, he blinks. “There’s nothing secretive about it. It is an affliction, and a damaging one.”

“An affliction?” Loki says. “They are thoughts, and what else? It does not leave boils, or scars.”

“It can leave scars, if you aren’t careful,” Helblindi says.

“None that Eir would deign to heal,” Loki says.

“Why not?” Helblindi says.

Loki accidentally squeezes one of the cloudberries—the juice dribbles down his fingers.

“What can healers do about sadness that you feel?” Loki says. “She cannot stop you from—from taking pains when you ought to take victories. If you feel shame, that’s your own doing. Go undo it, whatever it is, instead of…whatever it is that you lot do.”

He wipes the thick juice from his fingers. The stickiness will not rub off; he rubs his hand with a piece of cloth more vigorously. He feels his finger rubbing red.

“Our lot,” says Helblindi, “isn’t ashamed of shame, if that’s what Asgard feels.”

The concept is unimaginable. Like praising failures, or condemning sacrifice, the juxtaposition makes Loki stumble. He cannot imagine ever saying to anyone in Asgard, or giving any notion to Asgard in the subtlest of terms, that he is suffering melancholy (not that he is, because he is not crippled, he is not weak, his mind is his own and his emotions are his own, and if they falter then it is because of tiredness, and nothing more, that’s all, he is just very tired), or even so much as unhappiness if a war hasn’t been lost or a shieldmaiden gutted in front of his eyes. What damage can there really be, if no one can see the sword?

“Isn’t that the very nature of shame?” Loki says. “To wish it would stay hidden?”

“How else will anyone know of it if you do not say?” says Helblindi.

“Why would anyone want to know?” Loki says.

Helblindi frowns.

“Otherwise, how would anyone take care?” says Helblindi.

“But,” Loki says. His voice falters, he doesn’t know why. “Why would anyone care?”

The way that Helblindi looks at him makes Loki feel like some grotesquely wounded bilgesnipe—pitied, but inevitably disgusting. He doesn’t understand why Helblindi won’t at least look away, and at least end the misery with another bash to the skull.

“Would you like more to eat?” Helblindi says.

His voice is soft. Loki almost groans; Helblindi is the nursing type, to take the huddled, sniveling masses under his blue wing. There is no point in keeping a bilgesnipe alive.

“I’m fine,” Loki says.

Helblindi does not look convinced. Loki wants to slip away, pull strings to another conversation to drag them far away from what Loki figures Helblindi is thinking now. Loki does not need anyone’s care—he does not have the audacity to strip the skin off his chest to show his heart (but he wonders what would happen if he did).

“You said you would bring me to your mother,” Loki says.

That is enough to make Helblindi’s face brighten, forgetting about all else. It gives Loki a chance to scramble back into composure. There is nothing wrong.

“Yes,” Helblindi says, feverish at faintest sign of interest in something on this godforsaken realm from Loki. “I had yet to tell her of your arrival—I hadn’t a chance, between tending to your head and now, but soon.”

“Soon?” Loki says.

“She is the ruling head of Jotunheim,” says Helblindi. “I cannot interrupt her just now—it would shake her entire day, and she has much to do for Jotunheim at a time. We shall, in the evening.”

The time seems both too far and too close. It makes Loki’s chest constrict, and breathing feels like a risk. Suddenly he has every urge to blurt out, never mind. Forget this all, and run away from Jotunheim, as he has run from every other realm these past several weeks. Faced with a familiar stranger, he bolts.

“What is her name?” he says.

“Fárbauti,” says Helblindi. “She took the throne when Father passed.”

“Fárbauti,” Loki echoes.

He gives a soft snort. Both his mothers’ and not-mothers’ names start with the same letter.

He wonders if he looks like her at all.

“Loki,” says Helblindi. “Would you ever want to know your first given name?”

Loki looks up sharply.

“You know my name already,” he says.

“I call you Loki, yes,” Helblindi says. “But it is not the name I first knew you by.”

Loki sometimes forgets that even though he is of Jotunheim rather than Asgard, that it means he has lived in Jotunheim for however little time before the rest of his life in Asgard. Two hours or two months should not matter to him, as he recalls none of it as an infant. Somehow, it still strikes him in the stomach, and makes him teeter between cringing and holding his breath, waiting to pitch forward as his stomach swoops.

“What can that change?” Loki says.

“I am not trying to change anything,” Helblindi says (Liar). “I would just give you back your name.”

With each new name, a grain of sand shifts until a beach becomes the deepest bottom of the ocean. His father’s name was Odin—now it is Laufey. His brother’s name was Thor—now it is Helblindi. His mother’s name was once Frigga—now it is Fárbauti. His own name is all he has left, and even that is a lie.

But maybe it is best to leave it all behind now, if they were never his to hold in the first place. No one would miss it—no one ought to.

“Then what is it?” says Loki.

“Come with me,” Helblindi says.

Loki follows, even though there is no reason to. This will not change who he was, who he is, who he will be. It will not erase what he has done, like a cleansing of sins to be reborn in a body he already bruised. He follows, because someone says _come_ instead of _leave_ , and Loki can only pretend to himself for so long that it does not make a difference.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for reading!! Earlier update this week, I'm working less on a schedule for this story and more on when I get a new chapter written, since this is more of a niche sort of story anyway and much less cliffhangers :). Hope you guys enjoy!

The city is quiet, if one must be even more charming to not be blacklisted. The streets are picked clean, but old, uneven stones and stains on the building walls. The buildings are old, and the doors don’t look like they could withstand a robber, if the occasion comes. It is not so much quiet as it is silent, but Loki can tell that this is no dead town. Windows crack open as he passes, before slamming shut again. Children—Loki thinks that they are children, although they are no shorter than he—catch sight of him and immediately halt in their running and shouting, standing huddled and distant. Children would creep closer and giggle at the sight of a town hermit, or a large, slobbering dog. These children, at the sight of him, hold their breaths.

Years ago, Jotun growled and glared, closing in around them when Thor came to claim vengeance against the wrong guilty party. They bared their teeth and clenched their fists. These townspeople look upon them at a distance, and then disappear.

“You’ve won your people’s fear,” Loki says.

Helblindi looks out to the emptied streets, as if the suggestion is worth considering.

“You’ve deserved it,” says Helblindi. “You look like an As.”

“What?” says Loki. “Have they never seen an Asgardian?”

Helblindi gives Loki a strange look, as if he is the one who does not understand.

“None that does not hold a weapon,” Helblindi says.

Helblindi never says where they go. Loki does not need him to. When he sees the stone temple, carved out of the foot of the mountain which the town wraps around like a content cat, he puts two and two together. He stops in his steps immediately.

“Why are you taking me there?” Loki says.

His voice breaks. He hates that it does.

Helblindi turns to look at Loki over his shoulder.

“What do you mean?” Helblindi says.

“To that temple,” Loki says. He has never truly seen it with his own eyes—none that could remember. He does not even know if this is the one that he thinks it is—perhaps Frost Giants have many temples for Ymir all over the city. But the sight of it makes his heart twist, and he wants to run away. “What is in there that you would need me to see?”

“Your lifestone,” says Helblindi. “Your name is on it.”

“Do you not remember it in your head, then?” Loki says.

He wants to back away, but he can’t. Not because he is afraid that Helblindi could sense his tension, but because he finds that he cannot move at all.

“I thought you’d like to see your lifestone, too,” Helblindi says. He presses his lips together, in some strange worry that Loki is not akin to. “It’s nothing frightening, I promise you.”

Loki only now remembers that Helblindi was no more than three hundred years old during the war. Very possibly, he would not have known that this was where Loki was left behind.

“It’ll only be a little while,” Helblindi says.

His voice is gentle—Loki hopes that Jotun cannot sense fear as easily as they sense melancholy.

He walks forward. Like a somnambulist, Loki, follows without thinking. This fear should neither exist nor matter—this past should no longer be his future. And yet, without this temple and that moment, Loki would not be here today, as he is, and that makes all the difference.

Helblindi shoves open the heavy doors. It is as if the temple has hollowed out the entire mountain, the ceiling reaching higher and higher until it feels as if it forms its own sky. Columns pour down from the top, like rain frozen within its tracks in some gradual pattern until one finally touches the stone floor. They glisten, as if they are made purely of ice. Loki thinks he sees a stranger brush close to him and he jumps back, only to realise that it is his quiet reflection.

He breathes in deeply. The air here is cool, but not frigid. There is an altar, at the front of the temple, and light pours down upon it from the small circles above their heads, like additional columns to hold up this roof over their heads. There are no rocks or slabs of broken boulders—the floor is smooth and the columns clean. Loki does not know where the image came from.

“See?” Helblindi says. “It is not so bad.”

Loki does not step further in as Helblindi traces a hand along the walls. There are garnets encrusted along the stone walls, glimmering in a rippling pattern of green, black, and gold, red that seem to shudder in the light with no meaning. There must be several thousands of them, forming this grand mosaic of color.

“See here,” Helblindi says. He stands before this sprawling wall. “Come closer and see yours.”

His voice echoes. Such a gentle voice carries so far. Loki cannot imagine that Odin could convince himself that he never heard Loki crying if this is where he truly lay.

Loki steps closer. When he stands at a new angle, where the light splays upon the edges of the gems, Loki realizes that as the colors shine they all form an image—a wide, stretching mosaic of the Nine Realms, with Midgard at the centre and all the other realms circling it. There is no sign of Yggdrasil, and Asgard does not tower over all the other realms like a golden, swollen sun. It is a refreshing, confusing sight.

“What is this image?” Loki says.

The mural is sans Yggdrasil, but the realms are still outlined with the shape of what must be a Jotun. The realms are connected to him, as if they are a part of his body, like his flesh is still in the process of pinching away from the rest of the body to form worlds, and rivers pouring from his veins to form the oceans. It is both grotesque and strangely poetic.

“Ymir forming life and the realms,” Helblindi says. “See? And here is you.”

Loki looks to where Helblindi points. He points to a rich, red garnet, deeper scarlet than any Jotun eye, in the pool of what must be Ymir’s blood that fills the seas. There is a symbol along the face, but Loki cannot read it.

“I am blood,” Loki says plainly.

“It is your lifestone,” Helblindi says. When Loki stares blankly, Helblindi adds, “Your gift to Ymir. Well, of course, you did not dig up the garnets at only seven weeks old and offer it to him, but it is a nicely physical gesture nonetheless.”

“What gift?” says Loki.

“A smile,” Helblindi says. “Ymir’s body was given up to us to form our people and our realms as we know it. What can we pay back with, except with gratefulness? When a baby smiles for the first time, we arrange a celebration, and truly their spirit has come to accept this good gift from Ymir, and accept this life.” Helblindi runs his fingers over the garnets—some are as large as his fingernail. “And we are all a part of the same body—of Ymir’s body. So here we are. Or at least, there you are. I’m right here.”

Helblindi points at a bright green garnet a little ways away from the red one. There too are etchings—Loki assumes it is the name, but he cannot read it. He does not know whether or not to bring it up.

“A smile at seven weeks of life,” says Loki. “And what of the rest of the life, and all its frowns and curses?”

“It isn’t currency, you bird,” says Helblindi. “Just because you will cry later does not mean you never smiled.”

Loki digs his fingernail into the engraving of the garnet that Helblindi claims is his. The cut is deep.

 “Who put this up here?” he says.

“Mother,” says Helblindi. “She was the one who first made you smile, so.”

Loki doesn’t know why he had always imagined that he was cast out the moment he came into the world. He thought that was what Odin had said—his birthright was always to die, never to live, so he should have never been given a chance. But here is his lifestone, proving that his Jotun mother and father held him long enough until he had smiled for the first time, before life went differently.

He never wanted to grow up Jotun. But suddenly, he cannot help but wonder why he had smiled, that first time, if Helblindi remembered. He is afraid to ask.

He swears he hears laughter, in the shadows. He is hallucinating, dreaming. The stones do not laugh. None of this is real.

“What did you laugh at?” Helblindi says.

Helblindi smiles.

“Mother says a glass one tickled me,” says Helblindi. “There used to be many of them, before the war. Now, things are too harsh and…well, a glass one cannot arrange a celebration, so Mother put the stone up for me as well.”

Loki does not know what she looks like. She is faceless, featureless, all he can imagine is that she has blue skin, and red eyes, and probably dark hair. He imagines her holding a baby to her chest, for endless hours (is that Helblindi he imagines, or himself?), placing this gem with a child’s name onto the wall.

He tears his gaze away from it, when he finds that his heart is heavy.

“These are strange runes,” says Loki.

“They are old Jotunheim runes,” says Helblindi. “No longer what we use today. That is your name.”

“Was my name,” Loki says.

“Skýla,” says Helblindi.

Red has always been Thor’s colour. Looking at it now, it feels no closer to being Loki’s than this ice, that garnet on the far top right corner, Helblindi’s colourful thread woven into his hair. It is just a stone on the wall, with a name that he cannot pronounce correctly the first time. He runs his finger over the edges before he even realizes that he has raised his hand to touch it—the edges are sharp, clean.

“The shoe does not seem to fit,” Loki says.

“Only because you’ve yet to break it in,” says Helblindi. “It would have been a lovely name for you.”

“It’s not quite to my taste.”

“It’s a Jotun name, of course,” says Helblindi. “Not like the ones on Asgard, I would imagine. ‘Loki’ is strange to me.”

“All my names are strange to me,” Loki says. Whether it is Odinson, or Laufeyson, or Loki, they are all false names. None of them are really his to claim.

“Mother named you,” Helblindi says. “Skýla, I mean. It means ‘protected.’”

Loki’s heart skips a beat.  Then it sinks, slowly, like a swimmer who gives up.

“You were so very small,” Helblindi says. “We were worried for your safety.”

“I see,” Loki says.

He casts his gaze about the temple. It is not a weak fortress. It is cold, but not drafty—there are no furs, no decorum, no safe knoll, but it is not cold and vulnerable either. This temple would be a strange place to discard a child, if it was so unwanted.

A small, trembling thought whispers into Loki’s ear. He tries to ignore it, but it slithers into the back of his heart, down his stomach, until it makes his blood feel like ice because suddenly his muscles ache and his heart aches and he is trembling, but he holds his arms and paces in order to keep Helblindi from knowing. A tiny, quiet thought that he suddenly does not know whether he wants to prove or disprove, for it to be true or false, that he wishes he never thought of, just to save himself the stomach ulcer.

Because maybe, just maybe, Odin is wrong. Maybe when Odin found him in this temple, in _a_ temple, it was not to be thrown out like the rest of the day’s rubbish, in a place of such quiet reverence where every child’s first smiles were immortalized with precious stones. Maybe, somehow, maybe not on Laufey’s intentions but someone else’s, someone who had held him and carried him and named him, wished that he would be

(protected)

Someone giggles. Loki turns around, but Helblindi is in the opposite direction, and with a voice that is decidedly much lower than the one Loki had heard.

“What is that?” Loki says.

“Sorry?” says Helblindi.

“I thought I heard laughter,” Loki says.

Helblindi looks around.

“No one is here,” Helblindi says. “Whose laughter?”

“I don’t know,” Loki says. “It sounded like a child’s.”

Helblindi blinks, before his lips part in some understanding.

“Maybe some have followed us in when we opened the door,” Helblindi says.

Loki braces himself. He expects rogues lurking behind the columns, towering vagabonds or something of the like. He doesn’t know where this image comes from. But it is empty, and Helblindi’s voice still echoes.

“Some of what?” Loki says.

“Glerbarn,” Helblindi says. He crouches a little—tremendous for him, but he is now maybe the same eye level as Loki. “They like to go anywhere where there are Jotun.”

He whistles. Something giggles again. Loki tries to look where Helblindi is looking, but he cannot tell what he is supposed to be looking for.

His thoughts are suddenly interrupted when he hears pitter-patter, like marbles spilling on a hardwood floor. He turns and immediately whips out his hand, seidr burning in his fingers, ready to hurl it forward.

“Don’t!” Helblindi says.

“What is that?” Loki says.

Lurking in the corners of the temple are creatures Loki has never seen before. Standing only two feet tall, they look like they are made of glistening ice—Loki could see the wall behind it right through it. It is almost humanoid, with a face, a nose, two eyes, little ears—thin and elongated, like a needle, with long fingers and a skinny neck. Its face turns to Loki, who stiffens—it giggles again.

“It’s a glerbarn,” Helblindi says. “They’re harmless, for the most part. Put your hand down?”

Loki clenches his fist, half tempted just to throw his seidr at it anyway, but he lets it dissipate. He backs away anyway, edging closer to Helblindi.

“What in the Norns’ name is a glerbarn?” says Loki.

“They’re just little creatures,” Helblindi says. “They live in the forests. There are many of them in Jotunheim.”

The glass creature toddles closer. Loki takes another step back. It is heading towards him, reaching out its long, sharp fingers toward him. It makes Loki think of a walking icicle.

“It won’t hurt you,” Helblindi says with a soft laugh.

The glerbarn continues to tail Loki. Loki dances out of the way, constantly walking backwards just to keep his distance. At one point, he accidentally walks straight into Helblindi.

“What does it want?” Loki says. “Will it not just give it a rest?”

“It probably thinks you’re a child,” Helblindi says. “They’re very keen on children.”

“What for?” says Loki.

“Children tend to give them sweets,” Helblindi says. “Come now! It’s all right. I promise it won’t hurt you.”

“Can they?” Loki says.

“Well,” Helblindi says. “I wouldn’t let it, but it shouldn’t.”

He smiles at Loki. Loki feels a strange rush in him. As if he had expected to miss a step on a staircase only to find himself on solid, flat ground.

“Watch,” Helblindi says.

He kneels on the ground and holds out his palm to the glerbarn. The little creature turns its thin face towards Helblindi, its round, foolish eyes blinking curiously. From the lines of his palm sprout delicate, crystalline snowflakes, its spokes reaching wider until Loki could see every intricate weaving. At the same time it grows, like a flower, on a thread-thin icicle, as if a forest grows in his hand. It is a far cry from the daggers Loki is accustomed to seeing in a Frost Giant’s hand.

The glerbarn titters in excitement—it sounds like bells. It trots toward Helblindi, plucking the ice blooms from Helblindi’s hand. It spins, holding it high over its head—Loki realizes this might be dancing.

“Come closer,” Helblindi says. “Look at it! Isn’t it a marvel?”

Helblindi casts Loki a good-naturedly expectant look. Loki sighs and kneels next to Helblindi. The glerbarn plucks another bloom from Helblindi’s hand and nibbles at the snowflake—instead of melting on its tongue, it cracks off at its bite, like a piece of sugar cube. At closer gaze, Loki realizes with a jolt that he could see the little heart in the creature’s clear chest—beating, a small, dark blue little thing that seems to flutter at each bite of the snowflake.

“You try,” Helblindi says.

“What?” Loki says.

Helblindi gestures to his hand, the snowflakes swaying with each small breath.

“I do not have that skill,” Loki says.

“Well, you’re out of practice,” says Helblindi.

“No,” Loki says. “I cannot create ice from my hand.”

“All Jotun can,” Helblindi says. “Hold out your hand for me.”

Loki hesitates before reluctantly bringing out his hand. Helblindi carefully pulls Loki’s glove off. His palms are colorless.

“Now,” Helblindi says, as if the unblue skin does not faze him. “It isn’t quite like the seidr that you practice. Take in a deep breath.”

Loki does so. He wonders if ice daggers might accidentally shoot out of his hand if he tries, rather than what Helblindi can do.

“Breath is important in icemaking,” says Helblindi. “Deep, deep breaths. Down into your belly.”

“I am,” Loki says.

“Well now you’ve spoken, so you’ve lost it if you had.”

Loki glares at Helblindi before taking another breath, until his chest expands and his stomach stretches.

“Now as you exhale,” Helblindi says. “Let your source flow to your hand.”

“My what?” Loki chokes out, still breathed into his stomach.

“Your hand, what is at the end of your arm.”

“My _source_?”

“Your source—did you never feel it?” says Helblindi. “Come—just let out your breath.”

Loki gives a long sigh. The glerbarn begins to run circles around them, its silver bell laugher ringing.

“Has Odin never trained you on controlling your source?” says Helblindi.

Loki laughs.

“Why would he?” Loki says. “He never told me I was even a Frost Giant.”

Helblindi blinks, his lips parted. He then frowns.

“But,” Helblindi says, “then how did he take care of you?”

Loki shrugs.

“However he deemed fit,” he says. “I was his ward. He claimed he was protecting me from the truth. His words, not mine.”

Helblindi’s lips thin. He looks away, eyes falling upon the glerbarn that licks at its spindly fingers. When he smiles, Loki can tell it is strained.

“Then,” Helblindi says, “I’ll teach you. When you breathe, do you feel the chill in your lungs? Not a painful one, but fresh, as if you’re breathing in mint.”

Loki breathes. He smells nothing, but in his chest, he feels a calm, as if ice soothes fiery wounds. Or maybe he is only imagining it, and there is nothing at all.

“Relax,” Helblindi says. “You’re stiff.”

“I don’t know what the point of it is,” Loki says.

“Try,” Helblindi says. “When you let out your breath, channel your source to your palm, and concentrate.”

“I haven’t the slightest—”

“Less talking, more breathing.”

Loki huffs in exasperation. A puff of snow suddenly escapes his hand; he jumps back immediately.

Helblindi laughs.

“Well, we are getting somewhere,” he says.

The glerbarn runs through Loki’s snowfall, catching misshapen flakes and layering them on its tongue. Loki snorts.

“Look,” Helblindi says.

Loki looks down and jolts; his hand slowly recedes back to its original (original?) pale colour—the icemaking had rendered it blue for a moment, as deep a blue as Helblindi. He pulls his hand away immediately. Helblindi’s smile flickers.

“It takes a long time to master,” Helblindi says. “I was a slow learner. Father had me train day and night for centuries.”

It is the first time Laufey comes to the conversation. Loki forgets that Laufey is not only his father, sometimes.

“I can’t imagine Laufey teaching you how to make snow flowers,” Loki says.

“He didn’t,” Helblindi says. “That is my own invention. I was not the warrior son—that is Byleistr.”

Loki looks up to Helblindi. He is broad and strong, like an older brother normally ought. His gaze, however, is soft. Looking into his eyes does not make Loki feel small.

He pushes his thoughts away. He knows nothing about Helblindi, not his past, nor present, nor future, not his flaws or strengths, not his annoyances or grievances. Only, he cannot help but feel safe, when Helblindi watches over him, and it is a feeling that he misses.

“Did you care for him?” Loki says. “Laufey?”

It is a bold question. He doesn’t know why he asks so blatantly, rather than wheedle it out until Helblindi does not even realise he has given it.

Helblindi says nothing. He reaches out to the glerbarn, stroking its bare head with one finger. It plays with his finger, like a pup.

“We all did,” Helblindi says. “In our own way.” He gives a half-smile. “Byleistr reminds me of him, a little. They don’t waste their words. And they’re very selective of who they are loyal to, but when they do, they will fight to the end. Father did, anyway.”

Loki hasn’t the faintest idea what had happened after he had fallen—if Jotunheim had completely broken from the Bifröst, if Odin hummed and hawed out excuses for the damage, if anyone had even mentioned the death of Laufey to the Jotun. He wonders if Helblindi knows that it was Loki who had killed their father—and wonders if Helblindi grieved.

“And did you care for him?” Helblindi says. “Odin?”

Loki holds out his hand again, as if he is feeling for rain. He takes in a deep breath, concentrating all his energy on his palm until his lungs rattle.

 And there, he feels his arms tingle, as a chill runs down his nerves, and his hand grows blue. He ignores that fact, trying to feel for snow in the lines of his palm, rather than ice that can kill. Snowflakes, large like rosebuds, sprout from his hand, albeit with no ice stem like Helblindi.

“There you go!” Helblindi says.

Loki risks a smile. The glerbarn runs to him, taking up the flakes with its little fingers. It takes a bite, laughs, and climbs upon Loki’s lap. Loki nearly jumps to his feet.

“It likes your snow,” Helblindi says.

“Doesn’t it all taste the same?” Loki says.

The glerbarn plays with Loki’s hair. Its fingers are not sharp, as Loki had thought, and its body is not cold. It presses closely to his shoulder as it reaches for his hair, combing it with great interest. He can feel its tiny heart against his arm.

“Look at that,” Helblindi says. “You’ve won its heart.”

Loki almost looks up to smile, but he stops himself. It strikes him, how Helblindi had nearly taught Loki a Jotunheim thing, much less a thing at all. He wonders if this is how Byleistr grew up, with Helblindi to calmly prod him in the right direction. He tries not to ask, what if.

“It wants me for my snowflakes,” says Loki.

“They’re easy to please,” says Helblindi.

The glerbarn tickles itself with Loki’s hair. Loki doesn’t know whether to be perplexed by it or amused—it’s a terribly dumb creature, but almost endearing in its simplicity. Loki tries to pick it up, but the creature clings to Loki’s shoulder, content where it is.

“They’re very easygoing folk,” Helblindi says. “If it starts getting defensive and tries clawing at you, then you know you’ve done something truly wrong.”

“Have they seen AEsir kind before?” says Loki.

“I would think so,” Helblindi says. “Asgardians come around Jotunheim often, after the war, to regulate and officiate decrees and negotiate with us on such…but if they don’t make snow out of their hands, glass ones won’t be terribly interested in them.”

“You just want to get what you want, don’t you?” Loki says to the glass one. It curls up on Loki’s lap, playing with the leather straps to his boots. “Calm down—easy, now.”

Loki lifts his palm and lets out a spark of green seidr, in the form of sparks. The glass one immediately tries to grasp for the shimmer, only for it to go through its tiny hand. Its enthusiasm makes Loki laugh—how impressed it is by such simple seidr! But he gives it another show anyway, and it opens its mouth wide to try to taste the little stars.

Helblindi reaches out to it with another palmful of snow flowers. It gobbles it up quickly, its bright eyes wide with pleasure. Helblindi strokes its head; its bell-chime voice seems to foam with contentment.

“You’re very gentle for a Frost Giant,” Loki says.

Helblindi pauses. Loki does not realise what it is that he has said until Helblindi withdraws his hand, silent.

“Why do you say that?” Helblindi says.

“Because I think it is the case,” Loki says. “I’ve never met one as calm as you.”

“Then you haven’t met many Jotun at all,” Helblindi says.

His voice has a strange edge to it that Loki doesn’t recognize. He turns his attention to the glass one entirely, trying not to notice, even though he does, and that edge drives deep into his stomach.

“That wasn’t meant to insult you,” Loki says.

“It does nonetheless,” Helblindi says. “What if I were to say you were not cruel for an As? What would that say about you, your people?”

“I’m not an As,” says Loki.

“Then do you think you’re as brutish as you say Jotun are?” Helblindi says.

“I’m certainly brutish,” Loki says. “If you mean to insult me back, I can say I have beat you to the punchline.”

“If you’re brutish, it’s because you’re just unkind,” Helblindi says. “You say you’re not an As, but you do not see yourself as Jotun either. Unless you’re a dwarf or a mortal, you cannot be neither just because you don’t want it.”

Loki says nothing. The glass creature slips out of his lap, tugging at his finger. It has a strong grip, but it cannot even pull him enough for him to lean forward.

“What do you want?” Loki says.

“To play with it,” Helblindi says.

Loki pretends he does not notice how much briefer Helblindi’s words are, or how much Loki can notice that at all. He gathers himself to his feet, shaking the snow off of his palm.

The glerbarn beams up at Loki when Loki stands—like a child it runs off, then looks bac at Loki expectantly, and runs again, along the columns, down the rows. Loki stands, bewildered.

“Is this allowed in your temples?” Loki says.

“I don’t think glass ones really grasp that idea,” Helblindi says. “Play chase—it’s asking it of you.”

Loki does not know what it is that possesses him to abide. He runs after the glerbarn. It slides on the stone floor, laughing when it dances out of Loki’s reach. Loki knew he could catch up, but his foot would always be inches away from stepping on it, and he would stumble on himself.  

“Aren’t you a slow one!” Helblindi says.

“Don’t,” Loki says warningly.

He claps his hand, trying to grasp the glerbarn in his grasp, but to no avail. It laughs again, it has a chorus in its voice box. When it runs, it looks like it is falling in the wind.

“Are you going to run around all day?” Loki says.

He lunges. His hand reaches out for the little glass thing, but his fingers to not grasp around it to catch it. Instead, they knock the glass creature forward, until it stumbles and falls to the ground. Loki is able to catch himself, but his companion is so light and delicate that it slides across the floor, its little voice clinking with panic, before it crashes against the wall and shatters.

Loki stops immediately. He waits for the little creature to collect itself together, to climb back onto its spindly legs and continue its game again, jovial, but the glerbarn is completely splintered, its head cracked and limbs snapped off. The tiny heart is not moving in its still chest.

Loki risks one step closer, then two steps. He bends down, holding out a hand even though it does nothing. Its eyes are still open, wide with surprise at how its new friend had suddenly shoved it. He picks up an arm—it dangles at the elbow, like a limp chain.

“The poor thing,” Helblindi says, his voice tender.

“I hadn’t expected that to happen,” Loki says.

“I know that,” Helblindi says.

Loki lowers himself to his knees, gathering the bits of the glerbarn. Holding the bits and pieces of its broken body now, Loki can only marvel at how much he had feared this creature at first glance, and when he finally let it come nearer and when its heart would beat against his shoulder, how very delicate this creature was. How he ran away from something that was so fragile.

“I don’t suppose,” Loki says. His voice is pristinely even, “that you know what to do with it now, do you?”

Helblindi rises to his feet and comes to Loki’s side. He holds out a hand to Loki; there are still flakes on his skin. Loki pours the broken pieces into Helblindi’s hand. They look much smaller in a Jotun’s grasp.

“Oh, Loki,” Helblindi says.

His eyes are on Loki, not the dead glerbarn. Loki doesn’t know why he says his name. He only stands there, watching, trying to recall what he did that went wrong, that somehow in the midst of just playing with a small childlike being he somehow managed to destroy it.

“It laughed quite a lot,” Loki says. “The entire time. Glerbarn don’t have lifestones, do they?”

They’re like resident mortals, he thinks, bitterly. Insanely delicate, muddling into businesses that will only hurt it, trying to reach grounds it cannot, dying with just a breath. Stupid, energetic, and so very small. He wonders what would have happened if he stepped a little too far to the right instead.

Helblindi’s red eyes look too wise and too old. Loki cannot take his eyes off of the dark, still heart in that unmoving body. He knows even seidr cannot wake it.

“Why,” Helblindi says. “You’re gentle for a Frost Giant.”

Loki would have told Helblindi that he got his point, but finds he wants to say very little at all now.


	5. Chapter 5

“Stay here,” Helblindi had told him.

Complications of the kingdom draw Helblindi away to his duties. He sets Loki into a courtyard—open, but surrounded by four walls, fit maybe as an arena—before leaving with hushed advisors, who cast glances over at this strange Jotun who passes as an As. Loki, at any other day of the year, would have smiled primly before immediately leaving, but he does not find himself in any desire to explore, or stir up mischief in these stranger’s halls.

So instead he sits by the conifer, tall and slim and shaped to resemble a tower. This courtyard is sparse, minimalistic to optimists and empty to realists. There is more attention placed on the smooth rocks arranged precisely along the path than the small shrubs along the walls. Compared to Frigga’s old gardens, even in its now unkempt and uncared state after no one owns it anymore, it is cold, too orderly, like a blank canvas with only one colour to its name. He supposes this is what the Jotun call beautiful, but it just makes Loki shiver.

“Mother wouldn’t mind you staying here,” Helblindi had said. “So long as you don’t cut down the tree, at least.”

Loki pulls at some of the needles. They come off easily—they are soft, unexpected for a tree with a thousand thorns. He pulls at a branch, for another handful of needles. It shakes the branches. Within the tree, close to the trunk, a pair of drowsy glerbarn scolds him for disturbing their sleep.

“Oops,” Loki says.

He brushes his fingers against the brushes. Their fragrance tingles.

The glerbarns curl up under the brushes again. They must have made their permanent home here. He wonders if Fárbauti minds at all, or if she takes care of them.

You’ll see her soon, Helblindi had said, and Loki’s stomach turns again. He paces, along the mosaic stone pathway, before he sits down again at the stone bench, trying to breathe in deeply, before he continues. For all he knows, she could come to her own gardens at any moment and see him sitting here, waiting for her, unaware. The thought makes Loki want to render himself invisible, even though no one is around to miss him.

“Fárbauti,” he says.

The name is strange to his Asgardian tongue. It sounds harsh, like a battle cry. It does not conjure the image of soft hands and wise lessons, but perhaps it does not for anyone. He does not know what sort of woman Fárbauti is. Helblindi had only said more or less.

“Fárbauti—Lady Fárbauti,” he says.

Surely she has a title, if she is ruling Jotunheim. But perhaps Jotunheim does not believe in titles—Byleistr did not beckon servants to bring the meal earlier, and Helblindi walked about the city with ease, without the pretense of people bowing or making way.

“Mother,” Loki says.

He does not know what he was saying, the last time he said that word, and meant it. It is hard to remember the very lasts, sometimes. He can remember the last time he spoke to Frigga, the last moment, but he cannot remember the last time he called her mother. The tiniest, most minute of lasts, and the most important, which will come to everything in due time.

He tries the word out again. Mother—and the moment it is on his tongue he sees Frigga’s face, but now something blurs it, as if there is gauze over her face, and not the funeral shroud that he imagines must have covered her. This usurper—Fárbauti—is faceless, voiceless, and yet she upsets this balance, this image with her existence, with the fact that she is alive and Frigga is not, and Frigga is not here to be called mother, but Fárbauti is.

Hello, Mother—in his mind, he imagines it. She—this blue, towering Jotun woman, who looks uncannily like Frigga except with red eyes and black hair—comes forward, with sweeping gowns and large, reaching hands. And the most childish Loki has ever felt is when he imagines that she smiles at the sight of him, and knows exactly who he is even though it has been a thousand years since they he had smiled for her first. She would take him by the hands, call him by his name—Loki, because that is the only thing he has—and know not of every stain of the past that had brought him to this doorstep. Like a clean slate.

The childish thought makes his heart almost soar, before it aches terribly. He banishes the image. He wishes he never thought of it, because he already has a mother. She is dead. She is not really his mother, and yet she held him as if she loved him, but she is dead. He already has a mother. She is alive. She has not touched him in over a thousand years—because she left him at a temple, or maybe because Odin had torn him away, because old rumors make less sense now and he does not trust Odin anymore for saying that Loki’s birthright is to die on a frozen rock when Loki’s first name means ‘protected.’

His mother is dead and alive at the same time. He fears loving one, who is dead, when she is gone and he cannot deny the one he will see in due time. He fears loving the other, and shaming the one who has no connection to him except being in the right place at the right time, but who taught him how to live. It is as if he will shame Frigga’s memory, if he considers anyone else his mother, even though it is undeniably true, and at least she is alive to confirm it.

And, Loki thinks (childishly), perhaps Fárbauti loved him, too. She held him to her breast and never let go, until one day during a devastating war, she lost grip of him in a temple. She made him smile for the first time, and then placed a stone celebrating his birth on a wall. She named him what she wished he would be. A child that was unwanted would not have any of those things, would it?

Somewhere, he thinks he is breaking Frigga’s heart. He cannot help but bitterly defend himself that this is not at all the worst thing he has done to her.

There are padded footsteps. Loki looks up immediately. His heart jumps to his throat as he looks to the gates. There is no one. He looks to the other side, and sighs.

“Oh,” Loki says. “You.”

Lohtu leaps from the windowsill to the ground, her paws making no noise. Her patchy black and white fur throws off the carefully measured balance of the courtyard. She sniffs at the shrubs, for birds, perhaps, before spotting Loki. She cocks her head.

“Where’s your tamer?” Loki says.

Lohtu does not answer. She creeps around the conifer, snapping her small mouth at the glerbarns far too high for her reach. Regardless, the glerbarns, sensing predator, screech in their high bough.

“Stop that,” Loki says.

Lohtu climbs onto her hind legs. The glerbarns begin to climb higher up the tree. The thin branches shake with each of their movements; one of the glerbarns’ foot slips just for a moment.

“Get away from that tree,” Loki says.

He snaps his fingers to get Lohtu’s attention. The fox is distracted for a moment, enough for the glerbarns to settle on a higher refuge.

“What would you even do, eat them?” Loki says. “You little sootball.”

Lohtu stares at Loki with her black eyes before sniffing around the base of the conifer. She marks her territory. Loki wrinkles his nose.

“What would the queen say about that?” he says.

He hears a door creak. He turns immediately. It is not Fárbauti, and he does not know whether it would be better or worse if it is. Byleistr, he reckons, will do nothing for his nerves.

“What are you doing here?” Byleistr says.

Lohtu immediately prances from the tree to Byleistr’s ankles. Byleistr’s stony stare does not lessen. Loki cannot help but wonder if this melancholy companion of Byleistr’s actually has any effect at all.

“Sitting,” Loki says.

“Riveting,” says Byleistr.

He bends down to scratch Lohtu’s ears. Loki wonders if maybe out of Laufey and Fárbauti’s genes, he and Byleistr are more similar to each other than either of them are to Helblindi.

Byleistr elects to say nothing else, intent on focusing his attentions on anything but Loki. Loki does not know why Byleistr does not just leave, but perhaps Byleistr hopes that his tense silence will be enough to drive Loki away with his tail between his legs. Unfortunately for him, Loki grew up with Thor, and nothing drives him away so easily.

“Why is your fox neither black nor white?” Loki says. “Is it an arctic fox or not?”

“Have you ever seen an actual arctic fox?” Byleistr says.

Loki blinks. Byleistr snorts softly.

“Evidently not,” Byleistr says.

“I was under the impression that they are white,” Loki says.

Lohtu trots from Byleistr’s ankles to Loki, standing on her hind feet to place her paws on the edge of the bench. Loki watches her precariously.

“In the winter,” Byleistr says. “It is nearly our summer. They turn black in the summer.”

“Is that so,” Loki says.

He reaches out to try to lift Lohtu. Lohtu shies away from his touch immediately. Her speckled grey tail flicks his fingers as she runs away.

“They look quite different black,” Loki says.

“They change their look,” Byleistr says. He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Like you.”

Loki looks at Byleistr, whose eyes are fixed stubbornly on the small pond with a carved formation in the middle of it. He wonders just how much it will take for Byleistr to actually admit that he would like to throttle Loki, and if he would bother hiding it at all.

“I used to have a pet wolf,” Loki says.

He watches Byleistr carefully. Byleistr does not react.

“It wasn’t very much a pet as much as a wild animal I grew fond of,” Loki says. “I named him Fenrir. But I thought of him as a companion, anyway.”

“What fun,” Byleistr says. “I suppose we have at least that one thing in common.”

“Well,” Loki says, “foxes and wolves aren’t the same animal.”

“Then I completely recant my previous statement and we are back to where we started,” Byleistr says without missing a beat.

Loki raises an eyebrow.

“If you are fighting down the urge to spit fire at me,” Loki says, “then you are better off spitting than swallowing it down and self-combusting.”

Byleistr gives a start. He turns sharply to Loki.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t stabbed me yet,” Loki says. “And here I was, waiting so patiently for it.”

“I’m not spitting fire,” says Byleistr.

“Ice, then, if that’s what you Jotun do,” Loki says.

Byleistr grimaces.

“You _want_ me to throttle you, is what you’re saying?” Byleistr says.

“Not explicitly,” Loki says. “But if it would at least stop your blood vessels from bursting every time I’m in the premise, at least do yourself that favour.”

Byleistr narrows his eyes. Lohtu licks his finger. Loki shrugs when Byleistr makes no movement and continues staring ahead of him. Byleistr is harder to engage in conversation, even if Loki wants it.

“You—” Byleistr sucks in a deep breath. “—are a _murtr_.”

Loki stares at Byleistr for three long seconds—all the while the colour rising in Byleistr’s face as he holds his breath in utter shock at his own dirty mouth—before he bursts out laughing.

“Murtr?” Loki says. “I’ve been laying waste to your culture and people since I came here and the best that you can come up with is a _small fish_?”

Byleistr crosses his arms, both mortified and affronted.

“You laugh?” Byleistr says.

“I never thought Jotun would take water life of a certain size so offensively,” says Loki.

“You’re not insulted by that?” Byleistr says. “I called you useless and incompetent.”

“How are small fish useless and incompetent?” says Loki.

“Because you are incompetent enough to get any larger hunt,” Byleistr says. “You can only get small—you do not fish, on Asgard?”

“Fish is the peasantry’s dish,” Loki says. “Whatever your big fish is, would still be incompetent for us in Asgard.”

Byleistr clenches his jaw.

“Perhaps what you consider riches in Asgard is nothing but trinkets here,” Byleistr says.

“Unless you have a mountain of gold and Infinity Stones dug underneath that mountain over there,” Loki says. “Unlikely.”

“I find it doubtful that Asgardians would look past their noses to deem anything outside of their own realm worthwhile,” Byleistr says.

“Jotunheim would too, if they had just as much opulence,” says Loki. “Your walls here, they’d be paved with gold and silver. And your streets would be alive with business and markets, rather than the dirge of silence that plays hour by hour.”

“For someone who claims no allegiance to Asgard, you certainly are fond of it,” Byleistr says.

“This isn’t fondness,” Loki says.

“Right,” Byleistr says lightly, with raised eyebrows.

Loki tenses. He has no qualms of Byleistr’s sharp bitterness, or whatever low opinions he has of Loki. It is only that what he says strikes too close to the mark, and Loki cannot be sure what stands directly behind bulls-eye that would take the hit.

“Perhaps,” Loki says, “if Jotunheim would work harder, instead of lurk in silence as they do, motionless, your realm would not be so dismal.”

Byleistr narrows his eyes, his lips parted. It is a look that Loki recognizes immediately, even though he cannot recall ever seeing anyone bear. It is one, however, that Loki recognizes immediately as saying that he has once again, said the exact thing that would set the flame on the powder keg.

“You think it is out of laziness that we are in such a state?” Byleistr says. “A fine assumption! Well-founded, for an Asgardian prince who would not care for Jotunheim’s existence, much less the state of it.”

“A fine lot, coming from a Jotunheim prince who never left his realm,” Loki says.

“And you know damn well who put us there!” Byleistr says, in a voice that rips and in a voice that Loki finds far too close for comfort. He backs away, instinctively. “A blockade from all realms, an indefinite trade embargo, no contact with anyone except those who care enough to come to us, no access to any Bifröst to get us anywhere if we wished, unless Asgardians fancied to pay us a visit to hunt us and leave us dead in the countryside for sport—your realm even took our Casket, our power source, and squander it by locking it up when you have no further use of it, leaving us with nothing to rebuild—you’ve stripped us to the bare bones, to nothingness, and force it so that we could never rise out of it, and then you stand there—and blame it on our _laziness_.”

Byleistr draws back, as if his own outburst stuns him. He clears his throat and turns away sharply to distract himself with the pond, as if nothing was ever said between them. Loki lets the outburst and the subsequent silence fall upon him like snow after a turbulent wind. He runs his hand over his wrist, not because it hurts, but for his hands to do something, rather than sit and let the ice form between already frozen figures.

When Byleistr speaks again, he speaks with such a strange calmness that if Loki just tapped it with a fingernail, it would shatter with its false glass.

“I don’t suppose,” Byleistr says, “that people have the highest regards toward my realm back in Asgard, do they?”

Loki opens his mouth, closes it, and swallows. A stranger sense of self creeps up on him, that makes him recall the rich robes of yuletides past, decadent feasts of old, and an inborn security that was only lost when he let it go, along with Gungnir. They weigh heavily on him, as if ghosts lean on his shoulders, and demand to be carried up a mountain.

“Not particularly,” Loki says.

Byleistr tosses a pebble onto the pond. It zings across the ice and collides against the tiny bank that surrounds the water.

“Doubtful that they ever will,” Byleistr says. “You, just sitting there, seeing and listening to all this with your own senses, probably don’t believe me, still.”

“I believe you,” Loki says.

He does not know why he bothers to affirm. He does not know if he even truly does believe what he says, what Byleistr says. But he thinks of Helblindi, and watches Byleistr before him now, and finds that he cannot bring himself to consider otherwise.

“Perhaps you should shout more often,” Loki says. “It sounds like it does you good.”

Byleistr digs his finger into the ice of the pond. Loki cannot imagine that Byleistr isn’t secretly relieved by this. Loki has never not seen a Jotun angry in some fashion—truly, Helblindi is a far minority, when most of the Jotun Loki faces were in combat in some way, shape, or form—but truly this is a moment when this anger Loki cannot blame on battle rage and bloodthirst like in the past. It is a learned anger, not meant for beasts.

“That would not be wise,” Byleistr says evenly.

The fact that Byleistr responds at all is more than what Loki expects, or more than what Loki knows he deserves. This much is obvious.

“You would never make it alive in a flyting,” Loki says.

Byleistr looks up. Loki does not know whether or not he would be insulted by the deliberate change in subject, just to ease the tension.

“Those insult battles you Asgardians go on about?” says Byleistr. “How do you not utterly destroy each other?”

“At least one person is too drunk to aim,” Loki says.

Byleistr snorts.

“And I take it you’re the rising victor?” Byleistr says. “Is that what Asgardians consider a popular one?”

Loki smiles wryly.

“I’d call myself the crowned victor,” he says. “But while Asgardians take their slurs with good fun, they still have highly delicate egos.”

“And you do not?” Byleistr says.

Loki shrugs. Byleistr crosses his arms.

“Yes, you do,” he says.

“Do I?” says Loki. “And where did you get that notion?”

“You ask,” Byleistr says.

“One always wants an argument that is properly proved,” says Loki. “Perhaps I ask to better myself for the future.”

Byleistr gives Loki such a look that is both accommodating and exasperating at the same time. Loki is almost proud of this, despite the fact that he is Byleistr’s older brother only by flesh.

“Is that what flyting is all about, then?” Byleistr says.

“No,” Loki says. “It’s really to bother Thor until he cracks.”

He stops himself, a little too late. Saying Thor’s name makes him both scared and very tired all of a sudden. He looks down Lohtu, who has trotted over to play at his ankles, and absentmindedly squeezes the fox’s ear.

“What’s wrong with you and your brother?” Byleistr says.

It ought to be odd that his blood brother asks for his familial brother. Loki tries not to think too hard on it, else it would make his head or heart hurt.

“Nothing,” Loki says. “What are you asking that for?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Byleistr says. “It’s very clear.”

Loki thinks back with panic what he had said or done. He doesn’t remember being vulnerable.

“You’re mistaken,” Loki says. “There is nothing of concern.”

“Hm,” Byleistr says.

Lohtu clambers up onto Loki’s lap. Loki feels a sense of déjà vu and does not touch the fox. She nibbles on his fingers, as if trying to taste that muskox meat from earlier off of them.

Loki still feels Byleistr’s gaze. Shame burns and he forces himself to look straight into Byleistr’s eyes, as some sort of defiance against expectation.

“If you are trying to find some small thing to pity or shame me with,” Loki says. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong bait.”

“Why would I shame you?” Byleistr says. “You do a good job of it yourself already.”

“Where are you getting these presumptions?” Loki says sharply.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know that of yourself, even,” Byleistr says. When Loki says nothing, he lets out an incredulous laugh. “Really! You don’t even know it of yourself? How do you not realize?”

“You Jotun are an oversensitive people,” Loki says.

“And your lot are a desensitized one,” says Byleistr. “Which is better?”

Loki wants to say, Asgardian, except he cannot. One thousand years of being raised in Asgard had led up to him letting go of Gungnir from the shattered remains of the Bifröst, several years ago. There is no saying if he would have done something equivalent to it if he grew up in Jotunheim, but it is a hard truth, nonetheless.

“Maybe a different people,” Loki says.

Byleistr lets out a short laugh. Loki cannot tell if it is genuine.

“That would be your call,” Byleistr says. “I don’t think anyone has come upon Jotunheim from another realm that wasn’t overly angry.”

“Why is that?” Loki says.

“You do not know?” Byleistr says.

Loki says nothing. Byleistr bites at his thumbnail. Loki could see the way his jaw stiffens.

“I thought the pinnacle was the place with the best view of everything,” Byleistr says.

Loki finds it wiser not to retort. Byleistr huffs, turning away to watch the blank walls that surround them, a fairer sight than Loki, evidently.

“Asgard is the Nine Realms’ ringleader. If they want a scapegoat, the rest shall play along like sheep,” Byleistr says. “I know not how I have ever offended the rulers of Vanaheim, but certainly just by existing I’ve deserved their sneers and scorns while they come and refurbish their damn treaties.” Loki opens his mouth, but Byleistr cuts in. “It is true, is it not? I do not need to go to Asgard to know.”

“It is better if you did not,” Loki said. “There are ghost stories about Jotun told there. Parents think it a good idea to scare their children with the horror stories of Frost Giants and talk freely of killing them all as if they are cleaning the attics.”

“Do they,” Byleistr says. “Is that why you have yet to show your Jotun skin?”

Loki looks up to see Byleistr staring straight at him. The sudden attention makes him tense up.

“What does it matter, what skin I wear?” says Loki.

“It shouldn’t,” Byleistr says. “I’m just surprised that all this time, in the one place in the entire Nine Realms where no one would kill you on the spot for sporting it, that you do not even shapeshift to your original form.”

Loki opens his mouth to protest to find himself empty-handed. The answer ought to seem obvious, but he cannot put it into words, much less words that would not send Byleistr storming off.

“Have you ever?” Byleistr says.

“Yes,” Loki says. “At least twice.”

“Impressive,” Byleistr says. “Two whole times. I bet you didn’t even know about our tails.”

“Frost Giants have tails?” Loki says, aghast.

“No, but see what I mean?” says Byleistr. “You hadn’t any idea whether or not we did.”

“It is as you said,” Loki says, the color rising in his face. “If I changed into a Jotun in the middle of Asgard, I’d be killed on the spot.”

“You say that confidently?” Byleistr says.

“Certainly,” says Loki.

“Then that says a great deal of Asgard,” Byleistr says.

He throws a pebble at the wall. It bounces off miserably.

“Did Asgard not know you were a Jotun?” says Byleistr.

“No,” Loki says. “I didn’t know myself until several years ago.”

Byleistr lets out a low whistle.

“A mid-life crisis, I imagine,” he says.

Loki does not respond. He can never tell whether Byleistr expects any substantial reply, or if he waiting for Loki to take the bait to the bear trap.

Odin had said that he hid Loki’s heritage to protect him from the truth. Now, as he stands in Jotunheim, facing Byleistr as Asgard’s gild unravels before him, he wonders if that protection was from Odin himself, more than anything else.

“So go ahead,” Byleistr says. “Change into a Jotun now. See whether or not you have horns too, just in case.”

“You have no horns,” says Loki.

“Maybe you do,” Byleistr says. “Do you know for sure?”

“Are you so desperate for me to prove to you I’m not an imposter?” Loki says. “I can assure you, no Asgardian would bother coming here to masquerade a lost baby.”

“No, but a lost baby will masquerade an Asgardian,” says Byleistr. “How do I know you are not here to assassinate the queen? Last I saw you, you brought the Crown Prince here with you to kill our men. Then you came back, to take Father to Asgard and for him to never come back.”

“One of your kind goaded Thor with an insult,” Loki says. “Thor is stupid, but he doesn’t kill for no reason.”

“So a slight is your reason?” says Byleistr. “So if I called any of you a murtr, I should be grateful I didn’t have my throat cut out. Many good men died that day. Many of _my_ men died that day, and the days after that. But all is well, because that is justice. Someone insulted the Crown Prince. No, you are not saying that disrespectful people deserve death, but it certainly puts that to perspective, doesn’t it?”

Byleistr’s stare grows colder and colder. Loki swallows hard—he is not afraid, of course, that Byleistr would attack him (although, he does not deny, his hand is held still, his seidr warm in his veins, because this is a Frost Giant that is the matter here, there is always a threat), but that he will come closer to stabbing the needle right where it is tender, and bleeds the easiest and sorest.         

“What is your Jotun form?” Byleistr says.

“Grab my throat and see for yourself,” Loki says.

“No,” Byleistr says. “You choose not to, when you can pull it on painlessly and easily.”

“How am I to?” Loki says. He is afraid, yes, but he doesn’t want to be the one needled, for the hot poker to ram itself into his brain to see which limb twitches. “All my life I’ve been told that Frost Giants are monsters, that they ought to be killed to better the realms, that they are—they are savages, or beasts, whichever word you want to anger you the most. And now here I am—a Frost Giant, all of a sudden. Do you want me to run into the arms of what I’m supposed to hate the most?”

Byleistr rises to his feet. He is towering, a tree in the plain, a mountain before the valley, with fury in those dark red eyes and hands that have long been prepared for a fight. He is everything that one would fear from a Frost Giant. When he speaks, his voice trembles.

“You hate being a Jotun,” Byleistr says. “You can’t stand it. You wish you were anything else but this race, I know. You don’t even have to say it. But you’ve never known what it truly means to be a Jotun.”

Loki holds his breath. Byleistr must have sensed the tremor in his voice, because he raises it, as if to make it heavier and more difficult to shake. In a flash, he suddenly sees Thor, face snarling and hands shaking. He sees himself, spitting fire and running away at the same time. Fighting a fight they wish they could just drop and die before facing, because what was the point anymore. 

“You sat on Asgardian gold all your life,” Byleistr says, “where all the realms and races throw themselves at your feet because you are of AEsir family, your throne of riches and fortune, of safety and security, of approval and _want_ —you never knew what it meant to be a Jotun, to fear for your life when someone of another realm comes across you, even when you are at in your own homeland, fearing they might cut you down for sport. You don’t know what it means when none of the realms will even look at you, because to them you are foul and savage and monstrous, and we can’t pull on costumes and masks like you can to pretend, for a moment at the very least, that we can walk out of our realm and not be killed.”

Byleistr wipes his lips with the back of his hand. Loki cannot bring himself to look at Byleistr in the eyes. He cannot bring himself to move much at all. Byleistr’s words have the same effect as the snow, the cold that Loki never admitted that he was unbothered by—numbing.

“You think you wish you were never born a Jotun,” Byleistr says. If an Asgardian’s eyes are red, it means they shall fill soon with tears. Loki realizes that with Jotun, when tears threaten to fall, they have a tinge of violet, as if even colors grow cold inside them. “You’ve never been Jotun in your life.”

His voice falters and breaks. He turns and runs before he even manages out the last word. The gates swing close behind him. He does not wait even for his fox to catch up with him, who paws at the doors.

Loki sits still on the bench, with nothing but the _scritch-scritch_ of Lohtu’s claws and what must be the glerbarn sleeping in the branches, their deep breaths almost like distant wind chimes.

He looks down at his hands. The whiteness of his fingers should be enough to sting his eyes. With no effort at all, he can turn them deep magenta, like the people of Xandar, sun-beaten like a peasant’s, dark like Heimdall, gold like Thor. He can walk fluidly through any nation, any realm he wishes, with a flick of his seidr, and no one would bat an eye or wrinkle their nose. He could be any creature he wishes, and yet the Casket makes his stomach turn—the grip of that Jotun soldier on his wrist still ghosts over his skin, and the All-Father’s voice which echoed in the cavernous Vault still echoes in Loki’s ears. And for what, now, Loki cannot bring himself to say.

Lohtu gives up on her efforts with the gate and trots back to the only living creature left for company. Her face and underbelly is black, but the rest of her is a patchy grey and white, some strange in-between that belongs nowhere, late for winter and too early for summer. In at least a month’s time, she would be unrecognizable. In another half a year, when winter crawls back from its den, she would be yet again.

“Am I Jotun?” Loki asks.

He doesn’t know why he asks, much less why he asks a kit. Somewhere, between his As skin and his blood, lies blue flesh. But a Jotun is ice, and fire, and setting dishes for others before himself, praying to Ymir than the Norns, kissing away tears rather than brushing them off and imploding rather than exploding. None of these are his, and yet he is made of these same bones.

The fox tilts her head side to side, watching him from her place at his feet.  She is either black, nor white, nor grey—and yet all at once.

Well, says the fox, with the flick of her black-white tail. I don’t see how you have a choice.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your continuous support for this story!!! I really am so grateful for all your encouragement and time that you take to read this. You guys are great.

First comes the wall of defense.

The _Well, I’ve never_ and the _such exaggeration_ and the _you are being overdramatic_ , because Loki does not want to face Byleistr’s accusations that cut to the heart. Loki is not part of the problem—he is a prey of it, Asgard’s scapegoat because of it. Defense comes with torches to light the wall, and he burns with anger, not only to Byleistr but to Asgard, to race, to his skin, to heritage, to Laufey, to Odin, everyone else.

What does Byleistr know about pain, Loki thinks, and the thought of barbed wires wraps around him with some vindictive satisfaction. What does he understand of my luck of the draw? What does he know with his life built on truth and not lies and rank instead of ridicule?

 _He_ never had to—says one thought. _He_ doesn’t know what it’s like to—starts another. _I’ve_ had to go through—and yet again. _He_ doesn’t understand _my_ —and stone walls are not dissimilar to spider webs in the way that they surround and surround until the caught fly is less in a protective husk and more in a suffocating chokehold.

(It’s not my fault, his mind screamed at Thor. Except his voice could not lend a hand to his heart. It’s not my fault, I didn’t ask to be saved, it was your choice, it’s not my…)  

This wall is the hardest to break down. On other occasions, Loki does not go so far as to even try.

Second comes the waves of discomfort, that ebb back and forth and leave Loki miserable and nervous before he tries to reason it out of him (guilt is a constant companion of Loki, but he is not any more comfortable with it). The image of Byleistr running away replays in his mind, and those words that Loki had just one minute ago dismissed to himself as being overreacting, he remembers were spoken with a shaking voice.

 _We only jest, Loki, you should not be so upset_ are remnants of a childhood’s game that Loki learned to grudge upon. Looking at his own self in this eye and seeing reflections of the ones he swore he hated, he realizes that some sins, like a childhood pet, grow bigger alongside him.

Big brothers, by nature, must do this often.

He wonders how many times Byleistr feared his life just because an Asgardian walked on this snow. He wonders how much his own AEsir privilege has blinded him, and shielded him of the fingers and knives that Asgard would undoubtedly point at him if he could not hide as he does. And if Byleistr hated himself a little more and a little more with every poison Loki spoke.

He clenches and unclenches his hand. His fingers are very white. This AEsir skin is but a cloak, and he cannot give a good reason why he does not take it off.

Waves can bring in floods—keep treading, else you may drown in self-pity.

(I should be dead, says his mind, even now, and he is torn between fighting against it and letting it bind his arms so he cannot swim. I should be dead, I deserve to be dead, it’s my fault, Thor’s right, it’s my fault, it’s—)

Third, comes the questions.

So what shall I do?

So what can I do?

What can be done?

Can I make at least this right?

And despite the churning in his stomach and the way it makes his nerves clench, as if trying to numb himself of every bit of feeling—he wants to find Byleistr.

He runs. The corridors are empty. There are no servants in these halls. Lohtu runs ahead of him, and then disappears without a trace. The thought of running, and finding someone other than Byleistr (Fárbauti) makes him stumble.

He sees Helblindi first, in one of the halls. He is talking with who appear to be advisers, draped in strict, silver robes. When Helblindi sees Loki, he smiles. Loki has already hidden behind a corner then, before any of the advisers turn to see what Helblindi sees.

Helblindi approaches him, alone, when the advisers depart. He sees Loki pressed against the corner, fists clenched, breath strained.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay in the courtyard?” says Helblindi.

“Have you seen Byleistr?” Loki says.

He tries to keep his voice even. It is impeccably so, which he recognizes many times—in others—as a sign of conflict. He hopes that as sensitive as the Jotun can be, that Helblindi will not catch on.

“He’s gone training with his men,” Helblindi says. “Why?”

Loki hesitates. He is both breathless and holding in too much air in his lungs. It makes his chest upset.

“I just wanted to know,” Loki says. “To talk to him.”

Helblindi raises his eyebrows. Loki wonders what sort of impression he has given that would warrant this surprise. Then he remembers basically everything he has said and done prior to this.

“I wouldn’t interrupt him while he’s in the grounds,” says Helblindi. “He doesn’t like distractions.”

“I see,” Loki says.

Helblindi offers Loki a smile. It makes his heart sink.

“Do you hate me?” Loki says.

The smile disappears immediately. Helblindi looks at Loki with so much tender care that Loki wishes to stab them, just to sharpen the edges a little and get what he deserves.

“Why would I hate you?” Helblindi says.

This makes Loki laugh genuinely.

“I could write a list for you, if you fail to remember all the reasons,” Loki says. “I don’t understand why you _don’t_.”

“What have you done?” Helblindi says. He straightens his stance. “Did you do something to Byleistr?”

There is a different quality to Helblindi’s voice when he demands this. Something aches in Loki at this. He doesn’t know if it’s guilt or jealousy or longing or sadness or anything at all.

“Does it bother you that I hate being Jotun?” Loki says. “That I keep my AEsir, false skin? Don’t you—don’t you hate me for passing as an As?”

Helblindi draws back, perplexed. His countenance becomes somber and he sits down, against the wall. He is only a little shorter than Loki like this.

“It is painful to see you reject us, yes,” Helblindi says. “But I do not hate.”

“Why not?” Loki says. “Why don’t you hate Asgard, hate AEsir, hate me? I—”

Loki laughed and broke off. He had hated both Asgard and Jotunheim in the span of only several years of pointed attack. How much it burned, and how little light it had cast.

“I would not be at all offended if you do, if that is what you fear,” Loki says. “Asgard—AEsir— _I_ , even—have looked cruelly upon Jotunheim without any repercussion, without any regret. You’ve lived and seen yourself, Asgard at war with Jotunheim, take the Casket and toss you into the mud afterward. Kill your people, starve them out. Why do you not cast me out, why do you—why did you bring me here, why did you feed me and dress my wound and…”

Helblindi gives a sad smile. Loki’s voice trails off when he realizes how thin it grows.

“Perhaps,” Helblindi says, “I would have reason to. And I would be found faultless if I did. But if I turned, and hated Asgard, and spit upon the mention of Asgard, and turn away from its people, what difference would there be between me and the ones who have hurt my realm?”

“You have every right to,” Loki says.

“Do I?” Helblindi says. “Being angry is one thing. I do get angry, contrary to your belief. I do get hurt. But if I let you lay in the snow, I would not have known you. If I did not tend to your wound, perhaps I could not have learned more about you, where we fall, where we cannot agree, where we do. If I did not feed you, I would not have remembered how Asgardians are very different from me, but very much the same.”

“I spat at your people’s ways,” Loki says, almost laughing in disbelief.

“Do you still?” Helblindi says.

Loki almost says yes, but he realizes it would only be to defy, not to tell the truth. It is not that the former is unfamiliar to him—it is far more familiar than the latter. But he has said enough lies that he knew were untrue, and regretted.

And even if he had, the look that Helblindi gives him, Loki does not think he would believe him anyway.

“I am not a passive fool, Loki,” Helblindi says. “I do not hesitate confronting you and what you say. And I’m sure you realize that neither does Byleistr. But I do not want to hate. I do not want to be unforgiving.”

Loki wants to laugh at Helblindi. It sounds naïve and childish. Like a sitting duck, waiting to be mauled, or a lame warrior, unprotected. And something about it makes Loki hunger for it, badly, until his starving body hurts for it.

“Why would you forgive me?” Loki says. “I’ve done nothing.”

Helblindi bites his lips. Loki still stands, back pressed against the corner, like an alley rat, or a beggar, trying to hide in the shadows, afraid the sunlight would send feet kicking at him, trying to send him away.

“We’re brothers,” Helblindi says.

“How are we brothers?” Loki says. “We know nothing of each other.”

“I’d say we know more than nothing,” Helblindi says. “You are our brother—our family, until we lost you in the war. Mother locked herself away from everyone afterward. Father—I had mourned for you.”

We all did, Thor says, in a half-forgotten memory that it feels as if that was a different life, a different reality—a different Loki. Our father—

“What are we, but the same bones?” Loki says. “And what is that? Nothing more—you owe me no forgiveness.”

Helblindi leans his head back against the wall. He gives a soft sigh to the ceiling. These halls—of black stone and wide windows rather than torches of fire—are so different from Asgard’s. Loki does not think this feeling is homesickness, but he feels lost nonetheless, standing still.

“I know,” Helblindi says. “Family is who you’ve grown up with, who you’ve been raised with and love, suffered with and celebrated with. This is for me, too. But you say we’re not brothers, even though the same blood makes us up. Even if we do not love each other, are we still nothing more than strangers?”

Loki swallows. He sees strangers in everyone, and is a stranger to everyone. It is better this way, than to come too close, break the fragile little things and be cut by its glass, and let everything that he holds dear shatter in his grip.

“Perhaps your family may change,” Helblindi says. “You will lose love, or find new love. You will become perhaps both brother and son to one. But you can’t change this—if you were dying, if your blood was spilling, it would be my blood that could save you.”

Loki looks away. He feels blinding, with his AEsir skin. He wishes, for the first time, that he would be willing to let it go.

“Why are you here, Loki?” Helblindi says.

The question makes Loki’s breath hitch.

“I wanted to meet our mother,” Loki says.

His voice is small.

“You did not come here with that intention, I do not think,” says Helblindi. “Why are you not in Asgard?”

Loki finds this hall stifling. He wants to take a breath of cold air out of the window, and perhaps fall from it.

“I ran away,” Loki says.

It is all that he wants to say. Helblindi’s presence—and his words—are too kind for him now. He has ruined one brother. He has hurt another. He cannot bring himself to do any more.

“Does your family in Asgard know?” says Helblindi.

“No,” Loki says. “The All-Father does not see me as family, nor I him. And Thor—would be better not seeing me.”

“And the queen?” says Helblindi.

Worn cloth tears, very easily.

“When can I see Fárbauti?” Loki says.

His voice threatens to break. He wants to stop, he wants to rest. He wants to be warm. He is tired and he wants to be a child again, so he wouldn’t have to think and fear.

Helblindi reaches out and holds Loki’s wrist reassuringly. It is colder than Thor’s usual grasp on the back of his neck, but it feels nostalgic nonetheless. He does not know Fárbauti—he does not know if she even remembers him. But what mother could forget the child that she held close to her?

“I hurt my mother on Asgard,” Loki says. His voice shakes. “And my brother. I hurt them quite badly.”

“They will forgive you,” Helblindi says.

“He shouldn’t,” Loki says. “And she can’t.”

They say nothing. Loki looks away. He doesn’t know what he wants—he wants to see Fárbauti, and he wants this running away, this feeling of being lost despite not moving further, this sense of belonging neither here nor there to come to an end.

“We’re your family too, Loki,” Helblindi says. “We can be.”

“Will she remember me?” Loki says. “Will she know me?”

“Truly, she would,” Helblindi says. “When you were lost, she locked herself in her room for days. I remember.”

Loki turns to him. Helblindi smiles sadly and shrugs a shoulder. Loki wonders if the young Helblindi, merely a small child, would have banged on her door, calling for her to come out, and receiving no answer.

“Look,” Helblindi says.

Loki is about to turn to see where Helblindi’s gaze is fixed, only to see that it is upon him. He looks down and jumps. His hands are a rich shade of blue. He can feel the hue creeping up his arms, spider-web across his face like a blush, down his legs.

The sight is vastly unfamiliar to him, and yet he is not surprised to see it.

He looks up. Helblindi is beaming. There is a sense of relief in Loki’s chest.

“You look so much like Mother after all,” Helblindi says.

“I’ve never changed to my Jotun body on my own,” Loki says.

His voice is the same. He doesn’t know why he expected it to be different. Jotun do not speak in growls, after all.

“Very handsome,” Helblindi says.

Loki holds his hand out into the light, outside the window. There are engravings down his skin—birth lines of his family. He sees his veins, pale blue, through his skin. He puts a hand to his face. He feels the lines down the hollow of his cheek. Runs his hand through his hair—no horns. He almost laughs.

“She would recognize me like this, wouldn’t she?” Loki says. “Would she know me?”

He wishes he did not hunger for Fárbauti so much, because still in the back of his mind, he feels as if he is betraying Frigga more than he already has. The shame that he is running to his birth mother after his adoptive mother raised him, running to one mother when the other has long died, makes him crumble.

“Shall we see?” Helblindi says.

Loki is about to nod, then pauses.

“Wait,” he says. “One more thing.”

-

Byleistr is alone at the training grounds. With a staff, he spars with the practice posts. His movements are clumsy, brash, Thor-like and violent—distracted.

 _What did that post ever do to you_ , Loki used to quip to Thor, lifetimes ago, when family trees were straightforward, nothing lay beyond the Bifröst, when Loki could not hurt Thor and Jotunheim was nothing but a generic Hel. Things have gotten more complicated since then.

Byleistr lunges forward, striking the post. His foot twists beneath him and he stumbles. He catches himself from falling on his face, breathing heavily.

“You lunge forward too far,” Loki says.

Byleistr’s shoulders brace at the sound of Loki’s voice. He straightens, his back still towards Loki, rotating his ankle to test its durability.

“I’m a commander of this realm’s soldiers,” Byleistr says. “I know where I’ve failed.”

Byleistr turns toward Loki and sucks in a deep breath. Loki’s skin is undeniably Jotun—his skin and his eyes. Loki holds his breath, waiting, as Byleistr says nothing, only watching him. He feels like he has risen from the dead or something of the like, an impossibility, something that can be imagined but never believed.

Byleistr dares to step closer. His eyes trace the lines that their parents had borne upon Loki’s skin. They run parallel to Byleistr’s.

His lips part, but no sound comes out. There is a look of suspicion and wariness, and anticipation, as if he is waiting with bated breath for something Loki does not know if he can give.

“You look almost like me,” Byleistr says.

“With a bit more hair,” Loki says.

Byleistr snorts. He does not approach any closer. Maybe he thinks it is some sort of ploy for Loki to come bare and raw before him.

“I’m sorry,” Loki says. “For all that I’ve said and done. And thought of you and your people.”

Byleistr bites his lip—the same way Helblindi does. He looks to his feet—they are bare, calloused. Loki does not think Byleistr will forgive him—that is all right. He knows he does not deserve it—it is a gift of mercy that he never will deserve.

“I do not want to dishonor your people anymore,” Loki says. “Nor do I ever want to make you feel like you are valued as anything less. You are not.”

“What is this change of heart?” Byleistr says. “Why do you say these things?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” says Loki.

“Why would you apologize to a Frost Giant?” Byleistr says. He lets out a broken laugh. “Just hours ago, you thought us as beasts.”

“I failed to see myself as the beast, I suppose,” Loki says. He swallows. “You do not have to forgive me. I know I do not deserve it. But I ask that you would believe me, even though my words are worth little.”

Byleistr clenches his jaw. He closes his eyes, as if he cannot think while he sees Loki in this form, this form that almost appears more guiltless than Loki truly is. Loki feels as if he is on a scaffold, waiting for a sentence, for judgment. It is something harder than when he was handcuffed, standing before Odin, facing possible execution and torture and not giving a single damn.

“You look closer to how I had imagined you,” Byleistr says.

Loki does not know what Byleistr is trying to say beneath these carefully measured words. Byleistr takes in a deep breath. He readjusts his grip on his staff.

“Did you imagine me?” Loki says.

“Yes,” Byleistr says. “Often.”

“You knew of me?”

“You were the invisible child,” Byleistr says. “The one everyone knew but me.”

Byleistr finally looks Loki in the eye. There is no bite of winter in his gaze. His eyes are wide—Loki realizes just how very young Byleistr is compared to him.

 “You cast me a shadow, you know,” Byleistr says. “You were the legendary ghost. The child who could have never grown to disappoint our parents, or face fear and failure for our realm. You were the perfect one I could not compete with.”

He takes a breath. He raises a hand to reach out to Loki, but he hesitates and lets it fall back to his side again. So Loki takes the step forward.

“Then in reality you grew up to be a bit of a bastard,” Byleistr says.

“I’ll take that,” Loki says.

Byleistr gives a brief smile. Loki wonders if this is the first time he has given anything of that sort. They stand in silence again, letting all the pieces fall clumsily into their own places.

Finally, Loki lifts a hand. He remembers seeing Byleistr and Helblindi greeting each other like this, when he first laid eyes on Byleistr.

Byleistr stares at Loki’s hands, outstretched fingers. He raises an eyebrow at him. His eyes are less derisive.

“Do you even know what you are doing?” Byleistr says.

“No,” Loki says honestly. “But I imagine it is a sign of brotherhood.”

“It is a greeting,” Byleistr says. “Exchanged by those of close bonds.”

Loki does not lower his hand. Byleistr licks his lips, but he does not pull away. He lifts his hand as well, and presses his fingertips against Loki’s.

He and Byleistr are brothers—Byleistr is his little brother, is his blood brother, is his family. And they greet each other for the first time today. Hello, nice to meet you.

“See?” Byleistr says. “My touch doesn’t burn.”

His hand, long and thin, still dwarfs Loki’s, his fingertips nearly cupping over Loki’s entire hand. The shades of their blue matches, and the lines that run down their wrists and the bones of their hands meet seamlessly.


	7. Chapter 7

When Helblindi comes to find him, Loki can scarcely breathe.

His hands sweat—not a common happening for him. He is caught between wanting to run away out of sheer nerves, and running forward, because he cannot wait any longer.

Should he call her Fárbauti, or mother?

Should he come forward declaring who he is, or gently ease her into realizing?

Should he be joyous, or afraid?

In the back of his mind, Frigga hates him for betraying her.

He does not know what to say to this, so he tries to not feel it.

Helblindi leads him down the halls, away from Byleistr, away from the rest of town as they go deeper into the keep. Loki feels like a child, dogging Helblindi’s footsteps, two for every one of his. His heart beats nervously.

He wonders what they will do first. Will they catch up on each other’s lives? Will she tell him what truly happened that day that she lost him? He wonders what the truth is—Odin ripping him from her arms, her stowing him away in the temple as a safe house, war and chaos pulling them apart unwillingly.

There is a great door at the end of the hallway. There is no turning elsewhere, no curves to another path. There is only one else that stands on the other side of the door.

“What if she does not remember me?” Loki says.

“Why would you think you are so easy to forget?” Helblindi says.

He puts a hand on the door. Loki holds his breath.

The door opens to the throne room. The hall is familiar to Loki—the last time he was here, he had thought he had the world in his palm, and he could play it like a god. Now, he is utterly under the mercy of everything else.

At first, he does not know who he looks for. But before the throne, talking with several silver-clad officials, is a tall, indestructible woman.

She is regal, as if hewed out of the rocks like the temple only a stone’s throw away. The lines on her skin look carved on her, deep and dark as if her face would crack apart in sharp pieces. Her hair is ink black, like Loki’s, like Helblindi’s, free-falling and woven with strands of green and gold thread. She looks like a different universe—in the grey halls among her silvery people, she is draped in rich robes of purple, with gems embroidered along the hems.

His heart nearly stops in his chest. He needs Helblindi to push him forward to even set foot in the room.

“Mother,” Helblindi says.

“Not now,” Fárbauti says.

She waves a jewel-studded hand. She does not look away from her officials, continuing to talk whatever politics she needs with them. Loki does not mind—he needs a chance to catch his breath.

She looks nothing like Frigga. He can see his eyes on her, albeit finely lined. She holds her chin high, making her look taller than she already is.

Mother, his mind says. Mother, Mother…

“Mother,” Helblindi says. “Look—look who has returned to us.”

Fárbauti’s eyes flicker toward them, and then freeze. Loki sucks in a breath. He feels if he just lifted one foot from the ground, he would ricochet across the entire hall from the sheer nerves that wrack him.

Her eyes run down his lines, across the bones of his face. They trace his too-small shape. They lock into his eyes—they are red, like hers, and undeniably hers.

She takes in a deep breath; he sees her chest rise and nostrils flare. He braces himself—waiting. His heart beats wildly. He wants to smile, but he’s too stunned. His hands are shaking. All eyes are on him—this Jotun in Asgardian clothing. He only knows her in this room.

Her robes sweep behind her; they cast such a glint that they look like sea sparkle when she moves, as she turns on her heel, and walks straight out of the room.

The doors slam shut behind her. They echo. Loki feels the reverberations against his bones, because there is nothing inside of him. He cannot feel the blood that drains from his face, or his breath fall flat in his lungs.

“What was that all about?” says one of the officials.

Loki feels his legs turn to stone, creeping up to his chest, his arms, his head, until he cannot move, or breathe, either. His head is empty at first, before it floods with half-formed questions and thoughts and confusion, so many that he cannot understand a single thread of it.

“Maybe she—” Helblindl stops, then clears his throat. “Perhaps she does not—she did not see you properly. She was very distracted, just now.”

Loki feels very lightheaded. He doesn’t know what to do. Of all the things he imagined, he did not know why he never prepared himself for this.

“Here,” Helblindi says. “Maybe she—let’s go find her and—”

“I’ll do it,” Loki says.

His voice is strained. Loki gives Helblindi a reassuring nod, even though he is growing more and more uneasy himself. He does not know why Fárbauti walked out like that—without warning, without even a word or indication. But if it is because of what he fears, he does not want Helblindi to witness it.

“I’ll—” He loses his breath. He stops to breathe. “I’ll be back.”

He walks forward—past the perplexed and suspicious officials, through the doors that she had just gone through. There is no sign of her—he walks further down the winding corridors. His footsteps sound hollow, and too much in this empty place. He tries to walk faster, but his knees feel unsteady.

He thinks he hears her footsteps a little ways ahead as well, and the door close.

Wait for me, he thinks.

He feels like he is in nightmares he had as a child, when he would run after Frigga, or Odin, or Thor, and no matter what he did or how fast he tried to run, he could never reach them, and no matter how much he cried they would not look back.

Please, wait for me.

He reaches the door. It is heavy, small, secluded. He presses a hand against it. His palms are full of cold sweat. He wants to speak with his mother. He wants to know who his mother is. He does not know if she wants to return the favor.

He wants to run away. He is afraid of what he does not want to imagine. But if he turns and leaves now, he will have no mother, certainly. Frigga is dead and Fárbauti no one but a stranger. He does not know what will be said behind this door, but if he turns away, he will be lost, for sure.

He closes his eyes for a moment, before shoving the door open.

The walls are layered with tomes, even the windows, in which the light squeezes through the cracks between the shelves, and no dust hangs in the air. It smells of the crackling firewood.

There is a desk at the corner, grand and unbelievably organized, with a great many book and miscellaneous objects. He recognizes treasures from other realms—Vanaheim silk, dwarf gold, among other riches. They look old, but not at all dusty.

At first, the room looks empty, until Loki’s gaze falls upon the very silent figure sitting behind the desk, back facing the wall as she faces the fire. Her magnificent robes seem to envelope her, as if she is sitting in the middle of a vibrant carnation.

Neither of them make a sound. Loki can hear her breathing. He tries to breathe in sync with her. His lungs are too constrained to try, but he can tell that she is with unease as well.

“Hello,” he finally says.

She bows her head. He swallows hard.

“Do you…” he says. “Do you know who I am?”

“Go,” she says.

Her voice is low. He swears it makes the fire in the fireplace shrink.

“Do you know who I am?” Loki says again.

“I do,” Fárbauti says. “Now go.”

Loki feels the walls closing in on him. He cannot move.

“It’s me,” Loki says. He tries to raise his voice. It does very little. “It’s—Skýla, I—”

“Do not do this to me,” says Fárbauti. “Do not make me repeat myself.”

“Why?” Loki says.

He feels very afraid, and lost. She tells him to go, but he has nowhere to go.

“I’ve already caused enough heartache in your life, I am sure,” Fárbauti says. “Do not force me to add more to my record.”

The stones are falling away from Loki’s feet, and he is falling, fast, deep.

“I do not have heartache,” Loki says. “Not anymore. You have nothing to add to.”

“Do you actually mean that?” Fárbauti says.

“Please,” Loki says. “Do not send me away.”

 “I’ve already done that,” Fárbauti says.

Loki tries to breathe. He cannot quite get a deep another breath, every time he tries.

“You do not want me here?” Loki says.

“I did not think you would ever see me again,” Fárbauti says.

“And yet here I am,” Loki says. “Mother—”

“I am not your mother,” Fárbauti says.

Loki draws back. Fárbauti rises from her seat and turns to him. There is pity in her eyes. It makes her even more distant from him.

“It truly is a shame,” she says, “that it had to be this way.”

“What way?” Loki says.

He does not stutter, but it is as if his words missed a step, and he cannot quite remember his balance, his lines. He knows he heard Helblindi correctly—their mother locked herself in her room for days after losing him, she had held him in her arms, she had made him smile for the first time and placed a garnet on the temple wall to celebrate it. She had named him to protect him. Did that not mean that she loved him?

“Why are you here?” Fárbauti says. “It is not because of me, is it? Please let it not be so.”

In the rare moments of his life, he does not know what to say.

”You did not—” Loki stops to swallow, and regain his thoughts. “You did not—” He cannot bring himself to say ‘miss.’ “—lose me, then?”

“Are you not supposed to be in Asgard, boy?” says Fárbauti. She calls him no name, especially not the one that she had given him. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you,” he says.

He feels humiliatingly small. She sighs heavily and bends down to rearrange her desk, as if to avoid his gaze.  She says nothing, until Loki half believes that she has ignored his presence so determinedly that she truly forgot about him.

“Was what Odin told me true?” Loki says.

She does not respond. Loki is barely audible to even himself, so he says it again. Her fingers hesitate over several inkwells, but she carries on rearranging, as if invisible desk clutter is very pressing.

“What did the old man say?” she says.

“That I was—” Cast out on a rock. Left to die. Meant to die. Deserved to die. Born to die. “Abandoned in the temple, and he found me there. That I was alone and—left behind.”

Fárbauti brushes hair behind her ear. It is streaked with colourful thread and grey. She looks at him the same way strangers would with someone they wish to avoid—I don’t know what you’re talking about sir, I don’t know what you’re saying sir, you’ve got the wrong person—

“Why must you ask this?” Fárbauti says.

“Because I can’t stand not knowing any longer,” Loki says. “Different truths come at me in opposite direction and I don’t know what to believe or—or what to think and feel and I want the _truth_.”

“Even if it is not the one you came here to hear?” Fárbauti says.

Loki’s heart sinks, slowly, gradually. It weighs him down until he swears he can drown on land.

“Yes,” he says, without quite believing himself.

Fárbauti shakes her head.

“What good was there in seeking me out?” she says. “Why did you think to do this?”

“Helblindi brought me here,” Loki says. He feels indignation burn in him, to try to make sense of this confusion. “Helblindi said that you—that you would know me. He was confident that you would want this.”

“My son knows nothing,” Fárbauti says.

“Then _let_ me know,” Loki says. “Instead of taunting me and—bringing down towers with every word you say.”

“What more do you want to know?” Fárbauti says. “I had put you in the temple and Odin All-Father picked you up, what more matters to you?”

“Why did you put me there?” Loki says. “Why leave me at all? My life, I had lived an entire lie, the moment I realized what was lie and what was truth the rest of my path I had completely destroyed. That one day, of Odin finding me on the rock, has led to me here as a criminal, a prisoner, a killer, a crownless king, and I want to know _why_.”

“Because I would not have you anymore,” Fárbauti says. “Is that enough?”

Loki swallows.

“No,” he says.

His voice shakes.

“Why?” he says. “What had I done? You had placed my lifestone upon the wall, made me smile and named me—you named me.”

“Watch where you are stepping,” she says. “That rug is of Vanir silk, and you’re leaving snow on it. See how it shimmers?”

Loki looks down at his feet, leaving tracks on the decadent rug that stretches across the stone floor. The colours are fading—it must be older than Loki is, and yet kept in clean condition. Old riches that speak of bonds broken more than a millennia ago.

“You named me,” he says again. “I saw the name myself. If you did would not have me, why did you name me?”

If she tired of motherhood, she would not be mother to Helblindi, much less Byleistr. If she tired of Laufey, she would not have stayed by his side all this time, and taken the crown once she was widowed. If she grudged upon her title, she would not have any business giving up a child. Loki can only conclude that it was only himself that did not fit in Fárbauti’s perfect, shimmering silk and garnet-donned plan. It was he that she did not want, and nothing else.

“Was it because I was a runt?” Loki says.

“If you were born of normal Jotun size, I would have given you up nonetheless,” Fárbauti says. “But I cannot say for certain that Odin All-Father would have still taken you in.”

This strikes harder than Loki expects. He tries not to wince.

“Was it Laufey who did not want me?” Loki says.

Maybe Laufey had forced her hand, forced her heart. Maybe he had love for a runt baby even if Fárbauti did, and the years have hardened her heart. It would not be unexpected—Loki’s track record with fathers is that they demand a perfection that he cannot give.

“Laufey never laid eyes on you,” Fárbauti says. “You were born during a war. Conceived during a war. He lay with me and left.”

“What did I do?” Loki says. “What had I done that—what had happened?”

“There are better things to talk about than this,” Fárbauti says.

“Is there?” Loki says. “You would rather talk with me about anything else—would you even want to talk to me at all?”

Fárbauti does not answer readily. Loki’s throat tightens. He does not know why this hurts. It should be more a surprise if anyone would look upon him and not think that he should have died. He thought that it would hurt less as the time goes by.

“Do you know,” Fárbauti says, “how much value is put on children in Jotunheim?”

Loki feels every breath in his chest—it feels like he’s carving the insides of his ribs with a cold knife. Fárbauti runs a finger across her lips, hesitating.

“Yes,” Loki says. “Helblindi has told me much.”

“It is expected that the parents would guard their child with their life,” Fárbauti says. “No matter what happens.”

Loki does not know why she tells him this. It only makes the wound hurt more.

“In fact,” Fárbauti says, “a parent whose negligence leads to a child’s death would be banished.”

The pieces fall slowly into their place. Loki lets out a breath, and it rattles like it is his last.

“Was that what you wanted?” Loki says.

“I was brought to Laufey against my will,” Fárbauti says. “And forced to endure what he dubbed as husbandry, as fatherhood. I had no say with him—he would not let me. His life was centered around Jotunheim, but in doing so he made my life a prison keep.”

She walks forward from behind the desk. Her robes are magnificent, her head colorfully adorned. Her eyes are cold, and full of a long-burning fire.

“This city, this castle was not my home,” Fárbauti says. “My family was of a different region, the ones I loved of a different region. You should know by now, boy, that I am a selfish woman. I would have set this very place on fire to run back home if Asgard had not done it for me.”

“So that is it,” Loki says softly.

He can imagine her—a young, fiery, desperate woman, lassoed to a son she never wanted, to a family she did not ask for. Seeking for any way to get back home. And if he thinks, about the Void, about the failings and crimes and bargains he made in the Void to save his life and gain a kingdom, he cannot blame her for gnashing her teeth to lose one.

“I grew to love Helblindi too much to let him die for my sake,” Fárbauti says. “I grudged upon Laufey, but I did not hate him. I would not lose his heir. But the city was under fire—death waited out on the streets, when Asgard came. And Laufey would not have known it was purposeful.”

A young, desperate, unyielding woman, who left her son out for Asgardians to come and kill him if they wished. Perhaps she hid herself, and watched from afar, just to make sure the deed was done. If his cries broke her heart at all, she did not show it. Maybe she did not stay long enough for even that.

“Then why are you here?” Loki says. He tries not to let his thoughts seep from the cracks in his voice. “You are queen of Jotunheim still—and a mother to another besides Helblindi. All of that—and for what?”

Fárbauti smiles half-heartedly. Loki cannot match it for the life of him.

“You did not truly die of negligence,” she says. “The All-Father saw to that.”

“Why were you not banished?” Loki says.

“Laufey was not convinced it was a crime, when he knew of it,” she says. “I told you that I would have done the same to you if you were perfectly Jotun-sized. Laufey must have felt otherwise. He thought it was a relief.”

“I see,” Loki says.

He barely can hear himself say even that.

“I am weak and strong, boy,” she says. “Perhaps if I were weaker, or stronger, I would have run off nonetheless, and if I were weaker, or stronger, I would have not stayed here to learn to adapt. Laufey was cruel, but my Helblindi is my redemption. My old home is ruined, since then, but Byleistr is my comfort. Jotunheim is falling, but I know my wits now. I am not the foolish woman I was one thousand years ago. The roots of a tree will ensnare a rock rather than be stopped by it.”

Loki finds that he has no breath to say much else. Facing the very woman who had given birth to him, he cannot find very much reason why he should be alive now.

She looks at him with such distant pity that he feels like he is neither Jotun nor As nor human nor anything alive. He feels like nothing.

“It was cruel of me to tell you,” she says. “But remember that it was you who insisted.”

“Indeed,” Loki says. His voice is faint. “I know.”

“I would have protected you from the truth if you would have only let me.”

“I know,” Loki says.

“And,” she says. And this time, her voice matches his—it is fragile. “I understand that the queen of Asgard has passed, and I give you my deepest condolences. But I cannot be the mother you are seeking for in her absence. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know,” he whispers.

He cannot quite look her in the eye anymore. He feels as if the world has shattered before him, not far from how he felt when he received news in his prison cell that Frigga had been killed, except no one has died and he has lost no one—and yet, he has.

“You’ve got what you wanted,” Fárbauti says. “You should go.”

Loki cannot move. He feels as if he is like one of those glerbarn, made entirely of glass, and soon to break. She does not want him here, but she would not even come a step closer to him.

“Go back to your family in Asgard, boy,” she says. “That is where you truly belong.”

“My name is Loki,” Loki says.

What was, is, and has always been his, he can hardly say anymore.

She sighs, as if this is a demanding favor he asks of her.

“Loki,” she says. “Do not haunt these halls anymore. I’ve paid my penance for that years ago.”

Mama, he imagines.

He imagines hands, cradling his face, holding him, letting him sink to his knees but not letting him hit the ground.

Mama, he wishes he could say. I’ve had a hard year.

“I will not,” Loki says.

He turns to leave. When his hands touch the door, he realizes that they are slowly turning white again—his visage creating a shield about him, one that he knows how to hide behind best.

 There is a breath behind him, as if Fárbauti wants to say something more. But when there is only silence, he does not look back. He closes the door behind him.

Loki cannot hear his own footsteps as he walks out of the hall. He takes a new turn that would not lead him to the throne room. Part of him aches to be with someone—Helblindi, Thor, even. Another part cannot bring himself to reach out.

He pushes through the doors, out into the cold, numb. He only walks forward, with nowhere to go. He leaves trails behind him. His Jotun form is gone behind the AEsir visage—he is neither here nor there, but at least he knows how to hide like this. With each step that takes him further from the castle walls, the more he trembles.

It begins with numbness, and then the reality settles into his bones until his knees quake underneath him. He does not know why it should hurt. It is his fault for reaping false hope in the first place. Odin had told him the truth a long time ago—he was meant to die before he truly lived.

Loki wants to be with someone—anyone—just to breathe next to and know that they would not run away. But who would ever want him if his own mother who gave life to him does not want him?

He walks until his feet are too heavy to take another step and he stands still, alone; he begins to cry.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for following this story to the very end! That means so much to me, and I hope very much that you had enjoyed this. As I've hinted on my Tumblr once or twice, this may or may not receive a companion longfic that would basically take place after AoU and other events, meaning that if I write it then it would be an Avengers fic. We shall see if that comes to light--I hope it will, as I am currently beginning to write it. If you're interested, keep in touch on my tumblr! And thank you again for reading.

_“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!”_ –Isaiah 49:15

Somewhere, in the back of Loki’s mind, Frigga hates him.

You abandoned me, her ghost says into his ear. You forsook me. After all I’ve done for you, all I’ve slaved over and given up for you, you tried to replace me.

Somewhere, in the forefront of Loki’s mind, Fárbauti does not care for him.

Her words echo. They still cut deep when he hears them again—ghost pains. He wants to lie down and sleep. That is what got him here in the first place—where farther can the Norns take him, he wonders.

Maybe he should have never met Fárbauti. Let him believe what he believed—that his birth mother wanted him to live, and never selfishly seek out to hear it in her words. He should have never thought of her—he has lost his mother, and the mother he has now makes him hurt, deeply. Now it feels as if he has none at all, and it is his own fault. Even if it is a lie, he could have existed in a reverie, and died in it, where he is not ashamed to come close to anyone.

He lingers deep in the forest, away from the city. He would rather walk than wallow, but any deeper and he would be lost, and he already cannot see the mountains from here. He doesn’t know where to go.

He should have been a better child—a better person, a better soul. Fárbauti did not give up Helblindi because of her love for him, surely then there was something Loki could have done or been that would stay her hand. But to want this is to demand his happiness—that he might have grown up not as himself—over the freedom that she had stifled out of her, and leaves Loki with a sick taste in his stomach.

He wants to run away. He doesn’t want to think deeply on this, remember too much—he’ll run before the reality settles into his skin. He doesn’t want to feel, doesn’t want to put into words this confusing, painful haze that he is blindly flailing through. If he has learnt anything from Helblindi and Byleistr, running blind will only lead him straight down a sharp fall. But he wonders if it is worth stopping, at this point.

So he does run.

He runs until his feet slip on the snow and the branches and bark of trees scrape his skin. It feels good, feeling as if he is getting somewhere.

This should not be unfamiliar. He has thrown away his first family, in a fit of petulant destruction, and he knows how his sins have led him there. Here, he only knows that what mother and father he had left him even though they did not know him. He does not think he deserves a happy medium.

“Thor,” he chokes out.

After everything, it is still Thor’s name that comes to his lips. He presses his hand against his mouth—he is ashamed to hear himself say it. After everything he has been given and after everything he has taken, it is only Thor’s name that comes to his lips.

Thor is no Heimdall. He does not have the eyes that see a trillion souls, nor does he have the ears to hear. But Loki cannot help but wonder if he could still hear Loki stammering his name now.

He thinks he would hate this land for rejecting him, despite everything. He thinks he wants to spit, and drip venom from his teeth. But he does not want that—he has hated all his life, more passionately than he has ever loved. He yearned for others’ suffering far more than he has suffered for others. He could leave this realm, scout for another, violently reject this Jotun family as Fárbauti had to him, and let that slowly eat him like a cancer. But he does not want that.

He stumbles, tries to catch himself but instead falls to his knees. They sting against the rocks. He runs his hand through his hair. He takes palmfuls of snow and presses it against his face as if it is water. It does not hurt.

He looks over his shoulder. He cannot see the city from here. He lets out a breath, and in a moment, he wonders if this is the view that his mother had yearned for so long.

It is silent in the woods. No glerbarn, no foxes, nothing but the breathing trees, and himself. He sinks, lets his back rest against a tree, and closes his eyes.

He should be dead, but he is alive. So what shall he do about this?

He thinks of Helblindi, and Byleistr. And, despite everything, he thinks of Thor.

“Help me,” he says, breathless.

He doesn’t know to whom he speaks, or what he needs. The cut in his heart still rips—if he lets it grow, there will be nothing left.

I do not want to be unforgiving, Helblindi says. And before the pain can fester any further, Loki thinks, neither do I.

He could stand up now, leave this realm, never come back and never look back, it would not make a difference. But he does not. He lost two mothers. One, he took for granted, the other, he pinned too much hope that is no one else’s to bear. He cannot demand that she justify his life.

“Help me,” he says, to Ymir, or the Norns, or to Thor, who is no Heimdall and has not the ears to hear. If he forgives, Fárbauti will still reject him, will still declare that she is no mothers of his, will not open her arms to him any wider. But she is his mother—if she would be dying on the battlefield, it would be his blood that could save her.

He laughs, despite the fact that he is short of breath. He does not know why he wants to forgive, other than the fact that he does not want to be unforgiving. He wants to love his mother, even though his mother does not want to love him.

“Help me,” he says because he cannot do it on his own—he is full of anger and broken shards that cut people when they try to touch. He says it to Helblindi, to Byleistr, who have forgiven him despite everything, to Thor who has tried time after time and reached the limit, to those far stronger than he.

Loki stands up. He takes in a deep breath, lets out a deep breath. He turns, and walks toward the city again.

-

The doors are locked shut.

There are no guards whose attention Loki can catch. No townspeople who will open their window shutters to watch him from afar. All the windows are bolted shut, the gates shut, the heavy metal doors shut.

Loki tries the entrance from where he had run away. The door will not budge.

He walks the perimeter of the keep. There is no stray open door.

He tries to call out. He swears he hears footsteps on the other side of the stone wall, too high for him to see over. If what he heard is true, no one stops for him.

He calls out for Helblindi, or Byleistr. Neither responds, neither hears. This is a ghost town in a matter of hours.

He could shapeshift into a lark and fly over this wall, but if he will not be let in as he is, he knows it will not make a difference.

The doors tower over him—he cannot force them open. He feels the deadbolt fastened tight. He cannot even see through the crack between the doors. He tries so much as to knock—no answer.

“Helblindi?” he says. “Helblindi—Byleistr. It’s me. Can you hear me?”

There is no answer. He shivers; the sun is setting and the cold settles on these rocks. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, and tries the door again. It is getting dark, and soon all he can see is the dull glint of the snow still left on the ground and his own pale skin.

Perhaps Fárbauti forbade the doors to open for him, or convinced Helblindi and Byleistr to forget him. Perhaps Helblindi and Byleistr take back their forgiveness and have decided to shut him out for good. Or they do not want him as a brother anymore. Or maybe, he wonders, no one can hear him from inside.

Loki steps back, his hand still lingering on the door. His eyes burn again, because he knows if he turns away now, he might never see any of them again.

His fingertips still ghost the door, the old, splintering wood. Hello, my brothers, my mother, my blood and family. Could we ever start from the beginning again?

He has lost a mother—she was true, she was love, she was good, and he loves her still. There is a mother—she lost him, she gave him breath, and a heartbeat, and he wishes he could learn how to love her.

“I forgive you,” he says.

He speaks barely above a whisper. He lets his hand fall to his side. He wishes he could learn how to love her. This wall might not stand between them forever. It still might. But today, this is all he can do.

He steps back, one step, two steps, watching the top of the wall for maybe a head to turn toward him, to call out, wait. When none comes, he finally turns, and leaves it behind.


End file.
